Marriage and Culture
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome, and today we are talking about marriage.
In the time of the Restoration there were some problems with marriage, and it’s one of those weird situations where there was actually resolution of the problems. It’s kind of like how in the Restoration the people of Israel were getting lazy about building and not prioritizing the mission given to them by God, and then they were rebuked and called to repentance, and they actually repented and it’s so exciting because that never happens in scripture.
Yeah, we’re actually seeing repentance, which is great because that’s our lives, right?
This is kind of a climax in a sense of the Old Testament theme of marrying within the covenant, that is, not marrying outside of the covenant. Could you give us a rundown of a few examples of this problem cropping up before, Greg?
There’s that whole thing about when the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair and took them wives of all that they chose. And no, those are not demons intermarrying with human females. It’s the covenant line, the children of God, marrying with unbelievers because they’re pretty.
That is a very interesting question, to which I have no immediate answer beyond the obvious, “Because He would.” God has not taken away from fallen humanity most of the external blessings. Most people get up and find that they can breathe and that their hearts are pumping and that gravity hasn’t failed and that there’s still a sun in the sky and that they have two arms and two legs and two eyes and all that. There are still roses. There’s still a blue sky. And there are still pretty girls and handsome men. God could have. He chose in his overflowing mercy not to.
And you can take it a step beyond this. It’s also true that some of those pretty/handsome people are really nice. Sometimes they’re nicer than Christians, so there is that temptation there. “This person likes me and I like him or her. He or she would make a great spouse. I’m sure we can work that faith in Christ thing out later, right? Someone so nice – she’s going to go to church with me and she’ll fit in so great and I’m sure eventually she’ll go to a women’s study. God will bless her with faith someplace along the line and we’ll bring up our children in the fear of the Lord. It just may take some time.”
No, I’m not being at all bitter over the numerous female students I’ve trained who did that. It’s actually more often the females. Sometimes it’s the males. Having been warned over and over again that they can’t do this, they go and do it, and they’ve got great reasons. One of them recently quoted back to me a line from Pinafore, “But Daddy, I love him.” She did it in self-mockery. So we have that whole thing that brought on the flood and destroyed the world. It was this very sin.
I think the truth of God’s beauty being reflected by the image being more permanent than the corruption of man is important, too. That our corruption is so small compared to God’s perfection. Who would we be to think that we could so immediately wipe out any image of God’s goodness.
That would be called hell, and it did seem to be a real danger when God came calling on Adam and Eve after their first sin. But the moment God started talking about life beyond the garden, it became very clear that his grace is greater than all of our sins, and even what we sometimes call common grace, the overflow of special grace into the world around us, is greater than the wrath that awaits us one day.
In the meantime, while God is busy redeeming the planet, there will be a great deal of beauty – aesthetic beauty, but also the beauty of character, of personality, of intelligence. There are all kinds of good things that God has left in this world, and sometimes the people who have these things are in fact attractive. They’re fun. It’s easy to love them. Why not just take the next step and make it permanent, till death and all that? And yet, God said no. He said no and brought a flood on the world.
He said no to the same thing in the time of the Judges, as Israel repeatedly went after the daughters of strange gods and brought judgement, oppression, and foreign invasion. He said no to Solomon, and Solomon collected 1,000 wives, most of them Gentiles, apparently almost all of them, maybe all of them unbelievers. It divided the kingdom and threatened the Messianic line.
Then there’s not quite the same thing but the kingly line, the Davidic line marrying into the line of Ahab and Jezebel. Probably nobody involved in there was exactly godly. Well, actually the father of the bridegroom, Jehosophat, was godly, and yet he managed to marry off his unbelieving son to Athaliah, the unbelieving daughter of an unbelieving murderous Jezebel, and that almost destroyed the Messianic line.
And here we are again. It happens in Ezra. It happens in Nehemiah a few years later. And Malachi, who’s writing about the same time, also mentions that this was a thing. It’s something we keep coming back to.
You talked about this being sort of the climax of this theme, but remember we’re at the end of the Old Testament history. This is kind of the climax of the Old Testament. We’re marveling at how, “Wow, God’s people obey, and they get rebuked and they obey, and they get rebuked and they repent and they obey.” And yet we’re still seeing the same sin again, and it’s still 400 years or more to Christ, and we’re left hanging, as it were.
As this season ends and we see our hero on the floor bleeding out, we wonder, “Oh no, can I wait the summer to see the new season and find out how they’re going to save him?” It’s kind of God’s covenant promises. It’s the hope of Messiah. These are the people we’re trusting with the future of the world? With the plan of God? With the gospel? And they can’t even marry the right people? What is going on here and where is this going? Then we go silent for 400 years, waiting to see what will come.
It’s like the scene in Princess Bride when Buttercup is marrying Humperdinck, if you just paused there for a good while – “No, she can’t marry him!”
It’s innate because we know how it’s got to be. If salvation exists at all, that’s how it has to work. The hero has to survive to accomplish what has to be done. What happens beyond that – well, we know how Jesus did it. None of us is Jesus, so none of our heroes – I almost said something ridiculous. I almost said none of our heroes die and rise again, and yet the fantasy literature of the world – let’s see, Gandalf, Superman, Captain America, Wesley – we keep coming up with this.
So this was it. This was the summing up. This was showing this is an ongoing theme. Covenant faithfulness means that when you marry, that marriage is bigger than your needs, your desires, your happiness, your experience with true love. All those things have a place, I suppose, but the thing that echoes through eternity is how does this marriage center around and support the kingdom of God, not only right now but how does it push us into the future? That’s where children come in.
The Book of Common Prayer lists three reasons for biblical marriage. First, the mutual society and comfort one ought to have of another, so there’s that element of friendship and helping. Then keeping us from sexual sin, echoing Paul in 1 Corinthians 7. And then – I actually have the words, so I will read them – the procreation of children to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord and to the praise of his Holy name.
There’s a lot of things that the prayer book doesn’t say and that scripture doesn’t say. Some of them can be included if we get our priorities straight. God never says, “Go fall in love and then marry that person.” He does say, “You got married. Love that person.” He doesn’t talk about meeting your needs or fulfilling your dreams, although if your dreams are godly and your needs are real and you’re seeking answers in Christ, marriage may play a part in all of that.
The danger in our age is – I was going to say that we make marriage an idol. I suppose some people do, but I think more often people make something else an idol and then marriage becomes our way of trying to get at that thing, which ultimately is what idols are, isn’t it? We make something else our god, and then marriage becomes the idol through which we reach out, hoping to grab our god.
I know that there’s a very strong tendency to deny the possibility that marriage can be an idol, because in the broader culture it’s really not an idol. It’s just kind of this quaint historical thing that sometimes you do for tax benefits. That’s certainly true, but for those living in a Christian subculture at the very least, and a post-Christian culture that we are now, it can be very much an idol to essentially say, “This is how I get at being a godly person.”
I think there are a lot of people who do that – our favorite punching bags in Moscow, for instance – but it’s a real temptation. Like you said, I hadn’t quite heard it put that way before. It’s like marriage isn’t always the thing that we’re trying to get at. It’s normally other things, using marriage as an idol. It’s an illicit use of marriage, even though I wouldn’t ever claim that the marriage itself was illicit for trying to do that, but it definitely is a case of disordered priorities.
For a brief time in American Christian culture, I think a time that may now have passed, there was all this hoopla about getting to marriage, getting there the right way, on the right terms, doing courtship just right, all of that, because if you get there and do that, then you will be blessed.
And if you do that right, then you’re also guaranteed to get married in the first place.
Which is really weird when the steps toward marriage include never pursuing anyone ever.
You know, I’m glad I missed all that. That came along just a couple years before I actually got married. When I ran into the idea of courtship, I knew exactly what it meant because I’m a medievalist. I study ancient history, so I could explain to people exactly what was going on with it. But then as it became more and more of this manufactured thing done in the flesh – “We have rules. Follow these rules. Some of them you’ve never heard of and neither has anyone else, but they’re rules that are great and they’re godly, and godly people will embrace them and you’ll have a great marriage.”
That’s certainly happening in ideas around childrearing as well. “As long as you do X, Y, and Z, your children will not fall away.” It may be true that God would use those means. I don’t want to heap burdens on people because I know that homeschooling and private schooling is not always feasible for individuals, but I think that is an ideal to strive for and to advocate for.
Yes, we recognize the propriety of parents being the ones to make decisions about their children and what they’re taught, but I know several families who did all the right things. They did all the right homeschooling co-ops, and some of their children fell away. Praise God, a couple of them came back to the faith, but for the most part not, at least at this point.
Maybe those seeds have been planted well enough and God will use them to grow the trees of faith. It applies to marriage, too. When you try to say, “Here’s the way to do it so that you never experience sadness, or you never experience loss,” it is a recipe for disappointment, even if things work out better than they should, because you think it’s going to be this ideal. Without recognizing the possibility for non-ideal states of being, you’re going to come away from that disappointed.
I just saw a clip recently from Viktor Frankl. I’m not sure if you’ve heard of him.
I really enjoyed that book. It’s such an interesting read. In the clip he wasn’t talking about man’s search for meaning. He was talking about optimists and pessimists, and he said optimists are actually the only realists because optimists see the world for what it could be, and they aim for it.
They always fall short because you can’t ever hit that ideal, but without the ideal to strive for, you’re aiming lower and falling lower than the low thing you aimed for, so it’s always going to be worse than the reality. But if you aim for an idea – and you could draw this out to truth and faith as well – if you have an ideal morality, which we find in the Ten Commandments in scripture and in the life of Jesus, yes, you’re going to fall short of that, but it’s going to be better for you striving to reach that in your own personal piety and the sanctification of the Spirit. I thought that was so interesting. I can see the truth in that, even though it’s not 100% correct.
It’s funny, I must have seen that on a YouTube feed or something, because once you started, Viktor Frankl came up and the optimism/pessimism thing. I don’t think I clicked on it, unfortunately.
For those of you who do not know, Viktor Frankl was confined in a German death camp during the war and survived. His book is in part a description of what it was like, and he came to this conclusion – those who live with purpose, who had hope, who had a vision that reached beyond just surviving day-by-day, survived and in some small measure thrived. Those who just saw the next task and nothing more generally died. You have to live by hope.
He's a Jewish existentialist, more or less, but the book is well worth reading. I very much recommend it, Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
So we’ve talked about why romance is innate. We hadn’t used that word yet, romance, but what I mean by that is this idea that the hero should marry his bride, the one he’s meant for, and she’s meant for him. Let’s bring that back to the Restoration era.
God’s people lost sight somehow of what they were doing. I haven’t thought this through so I’m just throwing this out, and feel free to expand on it. We have two things going on here. We have the rebuilding of the temple and how they get so easily deflected from that, and then the building of the walls, but now it’s the holy city. So we’re building this place, and at the same time we’re trying to build a community, and yet we’re trying to build it with the wrong people.
There’s a parallel here. The temple and the city are God’s bride. Israel is God’s bride. In both cases we’re trying to build into the future, and lack of faith is the common denominator. The future and a failure to pursue the future in terms of faith are what brings us here to the end of the Old Testament.
It’s like at the end of Judges where you say, “Doesn’t it get any better than this?” but this time Jesus is just around the corner, if 400 years is just around the corner. Compared to 4,000 years it’s not bad.
We might as well fill in the history, for those who may not know it. Ezra is a priest. He’s a scribe of God’s law. He has purposed to understand and study the law and to be able to teach it well. He’s gone to the emperor and asked for permission and support to go back to Jerusalem and teach the law of God to God’s people, and the emperor gives him thumbs up, so he goes. This is his heart’s desire, to teach the word of God, to build up God’s people so that they will be living stones in a living temple dedicated to the service of God.
So he gets there and barely has he set foot on the ground when people come say, “Uh boss, we’ve got a problem here. A lot of people have married pagan wives, and a lot of the people who did this are, well, our leaders, so it’s kind of a mess and it looks like you get to fix it. We’ll help if we can. That’s all.”
It’s not what he signed on for. This was not the plan. He was looking forward to some kind of great revival, of investing in the lives of these people with the word of God, of building them up, teaching them, instructing them, all that, hoping to train up a generation that would be ready for what’s coming, and he finds out that they’ve already screwed things up a lot.
The solution that presents itself is probably surprising to most Christians. The solution is, “Well, these men who have married pagan wives need to divorce their wives.” In our culture we would probably say annul the marriages. The book ends and Ezra hasn’t gotten to do anything except preside over the greatest series of divorces in redemptive history, and maybe in the history of the world. That’s not what he’s here for.
No, this is not a happy ending, but that’s where we leave Ezra in his book. He sees that this will destroy Israel. This will destroy the promise. This will destroy the covenant. This will destroy the future. It’s got to be stopped, and there’s no pretty way to stop this.
Some people have asked me, “Does that mean that the wives just get kicked out?” More probably they’re still responsible for taking care of their wives, sending them the alimony, but they’re not going to be married anymore, and God legitimatizes this. This is what God wants, because on the one hand marriage is not about being in love, although being in love is always nice. Well, it’s not always nice, but if it’s done in a godly fashion it’s always nice. It certainly can be a wonderful thing, but it’s not where the Bible puts its emphasis. That kind of romantic fervor that we find in Song of Solomon is the result of obedience to God.
When you’re faithful, when you trust God, when you walk with him, when you commit your marriage to him, when you work it out day-by-day, then those kinds of things come along and are wonderful. But trying to turn it around, it’s sort of like the revivalism in American culture. “At the beginning the Holy Spirit came and people got emotional, so if we get emotional the Holy Spirit will come, right?”
It’s kind of like in marriage when you’re making decisions based on how you feel. Even if how you feel is really accommodating and sweet and in love, those are not always the decisions that are building up your marriage.
It’s the decisions that you make in order to bring your lives into greater harmony intentionally, even when you don’t want to, when you are building something new together. That takes work.
Then we pass to the book of Nehemiah, and we’ve talked some about Nehemiah. He comes back to rebuild the walls and is successful there. He also addresses some matters of civil justice and cultural reform. But as we get to the end of Nehemiah’s book, he suddenly finds out the same thing is happening again. Israelites are marrying people from non-Israelite and non-God-fearing cultures. It’s gone on long enough that they have children, and these children aren’t even speaking good Hebrew anymore, or Aramaic or whatever they were speaking at the time. The cultural transmission has broken down to the point where fathers can’t even communicate clearly to their children, and grandparents are shut completely out.
At this time the faith is mostly summed up in Hebrew, with Aramaic being a close runner-up. Yes, the Septuagint will be written eventually, but we really aren’t there yet, so if you can’t speak Hebrew you don’t know the word of God.
That’s the condition we’re in, so Nehemiah addresses the same thing. He’s a little more forceful than Ezra. When Ezra heard about this, he fell down on his knees and prayed and repented for Israel’s sins, and in the process pulled out his own hair and rent his clothes. This is what Nehemiah writes –
And I contended with them, and cursed them, and smote certain of them, and plucked off their hair, and made them swear by God, saying, Ye shall not give your daughters unto their sons, nor take their daughters unto your sons, or for yourselves.
So he’s very forceful – pulling out their hair, striking them, cursing them. Again, our culture isn’t ready to handle someone like Nehemiah. That’s just too in your face, too violent, too unkind, too unloving and not accepting enough. I mean these people love each other. More than that, these people have made commitments, so marriage is sacred. You can’t violate marriage.
Well, both these men did because the marriages were illegitimate in the first place. Israel is God’s wife and they’re not permitted to marry the daughter of a false god. To marry the daughter of a false god is to come into covenant relationship with that god.
Paul says something very similar in 1 Corinthians 10. You can’t eat of the table of the Lord and the table of demons. This kind of communion doesn’t work. It’s going to be one or the other. You’ve got to serve somebody. You can only be in fellowship with one. What communion hath light with darkness? We all know the passage in 2 Corinthians where Paul is not exactly even talking about marriage, although it certainly has that application.
Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? For ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
Wherefore come out from among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you and will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty.
That’s the issue. Our generation is all about relationships. We never stop and define what in the world that means and why it’s a good thing, if it is, yet the Bible got there first. The Bible is a book about relationships, but the central person we’re supposed to have a relationship with is the triune God of scripture. Everything else has to pale before that, and anything that’s contrary to that we have to let go. When we’ve walked down the wrong road, seeking the wrong kind of communion, we may have to backpedal really hard, because there’s more at stake than my happiness.
There are Christians who marry unbelievers and they remain faithful and they have more or less happy lives, but their faith is compromised. Their obedience is compromised. Their future is compromised. And even if they go to their grave saying, “Well, we had a nice marriage,” well, you know what? It’s not about you. That’s a hard thing for 21st century Americans to grasp. “It’s not about me?” No, it really isn’t. It’s about God.
Now, if we love God and we are faithful, God in completing his joy will complete ours too. We will be blessed. But when we turn it around and try, even in something as personal as marriage, to meet our needs and our wants and our desires and our emotional quota, our romantic dreams, we will not get what we think we’re going to get. As a teacher of high school students, I have seen this far, far too often, and it’s not for lack of telling on my part, and warning.
I think we talked about marriage in every single class at Cornerstone, and most days, too. Maybe not most days, but every class at some time or other.
It is a very important thing to discuss with people on the cusp of adulthood. “Maybe if I hammer this in enough they’ll listen.”
But you know what? That too can easily become a thing of the flesh. “If I do this, then…” No, it’s not how it works.
“If I have the right attitude about marriage, then I will be perfect in marriage, and my marriage will be perfect.”
I don’t know that any of the people that I heard it directly from were saying it as, “Here’s how to get married soon,” but it was always funny. They were like, “It’s so weird. It’s like the minute I stopped caring about marriage I found someone I wanted to marry.”
While we’re busy pursuing our idols, God tends not to grant our wishes as much. If he does, then be afraid, be very afraid.
I remember you telling the story of Haman casting lots for what day and it was, “No, no, no, no” for a long while down the calendar, and then it was, “Yes.” It’s like, “Okay, cool.” Oh, you should have been afraid.
Same with Balaam wanting to go with the Moabites. God says, “Yeah, go with the Moabites. See what happens.”
The amazing thing is that sometimes – and I hesitate even to say it – but experience says that sometimes God is just over-abundantly gracious and actually, in spite of our sin and unbelief, he saves that unsaved person we’re in love with. It’s like, “Really, Lord? That’s not how I would have done it.” Yes, because we’re not as cool and loving and gracious as God.
Having said that, that is not an invitation for anyone to try that. “Oh, maybe I’ll be one of those. Maybe God will save my boyfriend, my girlfriend, because He’s greater than my sins. He’s smarter than me. I bet that’s what He’s planned all along.” Don’t do that.
There’s a similarity to some arguments I’ve seen in favor of open communion and their sincere argument of saying, “Oh, just let anyone who wants come to the table – no fencing,” not even what the OPC often does, which is to say, “If you’re a Christian you’re welcome, and if you’re a member in a church you’re welcome. If you’re not, please don’t.” And not even that, but saying, “You’re in this church. Come drink and eat.” The argument is like Judas ate too, and I’m like, “Yeah, that should not be your argument here.”
I think something may be missing there, and this would take some exegesis to prove it, but the danger is not merely to the one who eats and drinks unworthily. It’s to the whole covenanted community. Thereby God’s wrath is provoked against the whole church.
Yeah, the book of Jude. “These people have crept in. You need to take care of the problem.”
Yeah, because the judgements may not simply be to them. We are responsible for the purity of the body of Christ.
Here Francis Schaeffer’s book, The Church Before the Watching World, I recommend. There’s a section on practicing the purity of the visible church, which he balances with the mark of the Christian, which is love. So yes, the love that reaches out and rescues and accepts and receives, at the same time the holiness which protects the Bride. Both are true manifestations of the gospel, and without both of those we lose the future.
I suppose the third thing which undergirds them both is simply truth. None of us has the truth down pat completely. We all make mistakes. We all have doctrinal errors someplace that we may never discover in this life, and yet the basic doctrines of scripture are pretty clear and have been for 2,000 years. It’s not that hard to find out if you’re a rank heretic.
Most of the time. The moment you say, “Wait, I’ve got an idea that no one’s ever thought of before!” you might just be a heretic. But if we walk in the truth, if we maintain love and maintain purity by grace, by turning to Christ, holding onto Christ, keeping our eyes fixed on Christ, then God is generally pleased to do great things, but he does them on his own time schedule. We want them right now. We want the world saved tomorrow – I do, at least – but it’s probably not going to happen that way.
But I have got to the point where I’m no longer content to say, “Well, you know, 1,000, 10,000 years…” I’m at the point of saying, “Lord, you promised a lot. This may be rude and this may be out of line, but I would like you to start doing some things right now while we can see them in our lifetime.”
The worst He can say is, “That was really out of line. I said so at the time, does that count?”
It’s funny how many errors in the Old Testament or sins in the Old Testament we can look at as the Bride being impatient and trying to do things by herself. There was a time in American history where a bridegroom would build a house. That was his role, and the bride would have a hope chest, and she was working for her pre-marital lifespan to fill it with things with which to fill the house. So when we look at our role as the church as being to fill the house that God is building, we don’t get to move in ahead of time.
My analogy is not really well thought-out here. I’m winging it, I confess, but we can’t fill it on our own terms. We can’t build it. God is the one to build it. He is the one that brings people into the church. We don’t endorse “date to save” for a reason. “Flirt to convert” is also right out. It’s God who builds the house. Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.
Trusting God to build the house, trusting the Bridegroom to prepare a place for us, is kind of what we have to do. We’re here knitting tablecloths or whatever, spiritually, to try and be prepared and to be obedient and to populate – the dual meaning of populate, meaning not just with people but when you put all the ornaments on the Christmas tree, that’s populating the Christmas tree – that’s what I mean here. When God created the earth, he told Adam and Eve to fill it. It’s the same thing. And when we try to do that in our own terms, we start trying to build the house, and that’s not our job.
On that note, we’ve had some recommendations in passing. We had a suggestion that we should give people something to fight about in our recommendation section today.
What is the best book-to-movie adaptation that you know of? Now, the emphasis here is on the adapting. It doesn’t have to be your favorite book or your favorite movie. It’s just that the director/producer/actors did a fantastic job of making the transition.
My first thought was Maltese Falcon because they used the text of the book as the shooting script, but I immediately got booed down on that one in favor of certain Jane Austen things.
Recommendation: Maltese FalconThere are doubtless many other things. You could actually do the other, which would probably be boring, which is which movies have been made into successful books. Probably none, but…
Then someone suggested, “What is your favorite shape of pasta?” to which I replied spaghetti and got shot down in multiple directions on that one, because I’m just simplistic and old-fashioned.
I just forgot the name of mine. It’s actually shaped almost like a conch shell.
No, not shell pasta. It’s almost like a macaroni except that it’s longer and looped in on itself circular.
But not a corkscrew because that’s rotini. It’s something else and I only ever saw it on one person’s video making a pasta recipe on YouTube and I can’t find it again. He didn’t say the name of the pasta and I’m mad at him, whoever it was.
I actually haven’t read the book. I feel like a sham for having suggested that, but I’ve been told it is perfect, the same thing as Maltese Falcon. They just lifted it pretty much.
Another one in the same vein is my wife’s favorite movie, which is on no streaming platform. I always feel bad recommending it because you can’t find it. It’s My Family and Other Animals. It was an old Masterpiece Classic from the early 2000s. Is it Imelda Staunton who played Umbridge?
Recommendation: My Family and Other AnimalsWe started reading the book, and my wife grew up on this movie. She watched it multiple times. It was at the library and she always rented it. She just about wore out the DVD that they had on the shelf. We started reading the book and it’s incredible how many of the scenes are just lifted straight from the book and put into the script, so that’s my other vote. I have read both so I can recommend that one in good faith.
84 Charing Cross Road comes to mind, too, very similarly taking the book and using it as a shooting script.
Those of who have not yet sent us a recommendation, you’re running out of time. These are just some things to poke at you and prod you. If we rouse you to say, “No, you don’t know what you’re talking about! Obviously the answer is…” then good, send us something. We’ll be getting to that not next time, but the time after, I believe.
I’m partial to shell pasta of any size. Manicotti is great, but I like the really small ones if you make them with a butter/garlic sauce and it just gets all in there. That’s real good.
Recommendation: shell pastaI think specifically the BBC Pride & Prejudice is a wonderful adaptation, but I don’t feel like it’s quite fair because it’s a mini-series and not a movie, so they have more time to work with, which is usually the challenge. Emma was really close for me, except it’s just a little bit weak on Mr. Knightley at the very end. He says something very modern.
Gwenyth Paltrow. I am always amazed whenever I watch it or whenever I read Emma how they fit the entire book into two hours. It’s a normal-length movie and it’s exceptional, except for that little weakness in Mr. Knightley at the very end.
I will put in a good word for True Grit, the Coen brothers adaptation. The experience of watching the movie is very similar to the experience of reading the book, which is not at all true of the John Wayne version.
I must have been temporarily disembodied because I didn’t hear that, because I would have fought you on that. I don’t think spaghetti is a very good pasta shape. I think it’s the worst pasta shape.
That’s kind of what I got from my family, actually. What can I say? I’m old-fashioned. There was a time when that was all we knew in America, back in the old days – spaghetti. So there you go.
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