The Dark Knight Rises and Isaiah 1:17

While it is not a perfect movie, The Dark Knight Rises is one of the more positive examples of the intersection of faith and art. Certainly, the movie is not without holes, such as the lack of explanation for how Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) gets back into Gotham after his exile.

While these issues deserve attention, I keep going back to the movie for its thematic message, which reflects my favorite scripture from Isaiah: “Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow” (1:17, NIV). This scripture, especially the part about the fatherless, is the basis of Bruce Wayne’s journey throughout the film.

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The Other Rebellion – Written by Steve B. and Edited by Adam B.

Originally posted on October 2, 2013.

The following post is an original literary analysis from my dad, Steve Burdeshaw. I hope it encourages you while perhaps causing you to see things differently. My dad has always spoken of the New Way of Thinking, and God has helped me to take this concept one step further toward something called the New Way of Being. I believe what follows is one piece of this ideal, one small step toward a biblical legacy: to turn children’s hearts to their parents and to turn parents’ hearts to their children.

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The Hunted King

I spent most of my days singing songs and offering praises to my God for his protection. And yet, many of my nights I spent fearing for my life. Not in the way of a tree planted by living water. The glory of my youth long since passed, I saw that though God was often with me, he was not in me, and my desire for all that I could not be—all that he had always been in spite of me and all that he would remain after my death—became the thirst that drove me deeper into the wilderness of my years. A thirst for God will often lead you into a desert.

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A New Way of Being

“If you want to see what it looks like for God’s renewed people in Christ to be ‘royal,’ to be ‘rulers’ in the sense indicated by the vocation to be a ‘royal priesthood,’ don’t look at the fourth and fifth centuries, when the Roman emperors first became Christian. That raises questions and challenges at other levels, but to begin there would be to miss the point. Look, instead, at what the church was doing in the first two or three centuries, while being persecuted and harried by the authorities—and announcing to the whole world that Jesus, the crucified and risen Messiah of Israel, was its rightful Lord. That is what it means to be ‘rulers’ in the sense we’re discussing here: to be agents of that King’s reign, the reign of the Prince of Peace, the one through whom tyranny itself (not to mention any individual tyrants) was overthrown with the destruction of its most vital weapon—namely, death—and the one through whom therefore was brought to birth a new world in which order and freedom at last meet.”

– N. T. Wright, After You Believe

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Fake Blood

My life has been marked by symbolism, with video games providing some of the most poignant moments. Yes, you read me right: time-ravaging, life-debilitating muscle-atrophying video games.

When I first held the original Nintendo controller, I held it upside down. The black cord jutted toward me, level with my belly button, and then curved down and away—an umbilical between me and the 8-bit box. Mind you, it wasn’t that I thought the controller was right-side up. Rather, I was convinced that upside-down was the better way to play. That Mario and Luigi had a hard time conforming their behavior to my inverted will was not my problem.

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