Helix: Season One Review

Helix is a strange show. The show is both deadly serious and deliciously satiric, as exemplified by the title sequence where blood drips to the tune of elevator music. At times this unique mixture works; at others it becomes farcical. Helix is about a virus that breaks out in a mysterious science facility located deep in the Arctic. The virus causes humans to become violent zombies; a group of scientists (our protagonists) are sent to control the situation.

The show's modus operandi is to gradually reveal layer after layer of conspiracy and intrigue behind the virus, all while people die in variously horrible ways. The acting is relatively poor; the characters are fairly uninteresting; the plot-twists can be somewhat ludicrous. And yet, the show's macabre sense of humor and wonderfully absurd plot are appealing. How many shows gleefully display the explosion of rats in a microwave oven? Moreover, the facility isolated in the Arctic provides a perfect stage for violence and horror. As an enjoyable late-night diversion, Helix succeeds.

Book Review: Living on Fire, Life of Brent Bozell

Brent Bozell was a radical. He took no half-measures in all that he did and believed - as a husband, father, conservative, and Catholic. He began his public life as a conservative debater while at Yale; he was the bane of Communist sympathizers everywhere. He was a backer of Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater, even ghostwriting Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative. He was close friends with William Buckley, wrote frequently for National Review, and even tried his hand at politics.

Yet above all, he was Catholic, so much so that his Catholicism eventually consumed his conservatism. He founded the journal Triumph and became something of a theocrat. His anti-Americanism was particularly pronounced: America was "a vast moral and spiritual wasteland… [the American credo held that] salvation comes from democracy, education, a nifty standard of living, and a stockpile of nuclear bombs… non-Catholic America is morally disgusting. It is a panorama of evils: gay liberation, women's liberation, pills, pornography, sterility and murdered babies." Such writing alienated Bozell from the conservative movement and eventually causedTriumph's demise.

I had a hard time sympathizing with Bozell. While I agree with many of his ideas, his tone tended to be condescending and pugnacious. Moreover, his ideal of Catholic sovereignty in America was patently unrealistic. Yet as he grew older he also became more human. He struggled mightily with manic depression. And he emerged from this depression as a man of mercy, ardent to carry out Christ's corporal works of mercy to those in need. Not the most cheerful read, but a fascinating study all the same.

Continuum: Season One Review

While not electrifying, Continuum is entertaining. At the moment of their execution, a group of terrorists (Liber8) orchestrate a time warp that transports them from 2077 to 2012. Seemingly by accident, they transport policewoman Kiera Cameron along with them. Kiera quickly joins the Vancouver Police in an effort to fight Liber8—who are fomenting dissent in the present—and to find a way back to 2077. As the show progresses, it gradually reveals that something more than an execution escape was the cause of all these events.

Continuum is successful largely because of Rachel Nichols, who plays Kiera Cameron. She is beautiful and quite feminine, although not in a girlishly cute way. Rather, her femininity can be found in her shy but quiet strength; her resolute love for her son who remains in 2077; and her sense of duty in fighting Liber8. Rachel Nichols expresses all these qualities and thereby creates a likeable character. Carlos Fonnegra is her partner in the Vancouver Police Department. While not particularly interesting himself, his casual affability and occasional quirks play nicely with Kiera's character. Perhaps a fault in this show is that there are not many well-developed characters beyond these two. Alec Sadler is the genius teenager who will become the corporate giant of the future, but who in the meantime provides tech support and information for Kiera.

Rachel Nichols as Kiera Cameron animates a plot that would otherwise be merely interesting. The show could have closely examined the philosophy of time-travel. Instead, the show uses time-travel as a simple plot-device, and at times in a particularly heavy-handed manner—such as when Liber8 attempts to kill Kiera's grandmother in the hopes that this will erase her out of existence (the tactic doesn't work, though the show doesn't explain why). More troubling, the show occasionally descends to the level of police procedural, as Kiera and Carlos investigate various murders that seem only tangentially related to the plot involving Liber8. Double murder-suicides? Check. Journalist killed in political intrigue? Check. Ransom of a corporate CEO? Check. Nor are the members of Liber8 fleshed out into full characters. They veer from being political dissidents, to anarchic terrorists, to pawns in a corporate chess game.

Despite these faults, Continuum is an enjoyable show. The plots are snappy and the scenes from the future are particularly engaging. And the overarching theme of a plot from the future being hatched in the present is tantalizing enough to keep a viewer engaged.

Book Review - The Experience of God

In an age of philosophical poverty, David Hart enriches us with 'The Experience of God'. In this book, Hart shows that God's existence can be found through our experience of Being, Consciousness, and Bliss. Our awareness of being leads us to being's inherent contingency and the need for the non-contingent God. Our experience of consciousness shows us the intelligibility of all things and the need for the all-encompassing intelligence of God. Our yearning for bliss inexorably takes us to the need for the God of truth, beauty, and goodness. Such is Hart's argument, in a tremendously compressed form.

But in this book Hart does so much more. He persuasively argues that our modern culture has become almost incapable of experiencing God. Due to the prolonged influence of materialism and naturalism, our culture has attempted to fit all experience into the boxes of the tangible and the scientifically provable. Hart devotes many pages to deconstructing materialistic arguments against the existence of God. But in so doing, he recognizes that the true problem is not bad philosophy, but rather a disenchanted culture that cannot conceive of the spiritual. This book can be tiring and very difficult, but is ultimately quite rewarding.

Book Review - An Anxious Age by Joseph Bottum

I first became acquainted with Joseph Bottum as the editor of First Things, a conservative journal dealing with religion in the public square. In his brief reign as editor, he brought flair, elegance, and extravagance to the journal—qualities that brought about his editorial demise, as First Things has a rather serious audience that does not appreciate full-color photographs (an innovation of his) interrupting pages of lengthy prose. Flair and elegance are also on display in An Anxious Age, as Bottum renders a serious (and sociological) book into a light and lovely reflection on religion in America.

Bottum focuses on two topics. Firstly, Bottum posits the transformation of 'mainline' Protestantism into a new secular ethos. He persuasively argues that today's 'elite' liberals are in cultural continuity with the mainline Protestants (e.g. liberal but religious; not fundamentalist) that once dominated the American scene. The new 'elite' retain the old Protestant sense of superiority and righteousness, but have simply dropped Christianity along the way. Secondly, Bottum examines how Catholicism attempted to fill the void left by mainline Protestantism and ultimately failed in so doing. He argues that Catholicism supplied America a new political rhetoric—based on the ideas of natural law and human dignity—that Evangelicals embraced. However, he finds that Catholicism did not and perhaps cannot replace traditional Protestantism in America, as the country is Protestant at its core.

This is only a small snapshot of An Anxious Age. Bottum fiddles with numerous ideas and observations, all of which show how significant and how strange American religion is. (But what of the rise of Mormonism? This is a pertinent topic that Bottum fails to address.) Unfortunately, Bottum frequently digresses, in particular by writing beautiful but inapposite biographies of major figures in America. These digressions make the book feel like a collection of essays loosely tied together by a not quite overarching theme. Whatever faults this book may have, Bottum's elegant style makes it worth reading. And oddly enough, because intellectuals are almost always cynics, I finished this book with the impression that Bottum is a man who genuinely cares for both religion and America.