E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

This blog has often over the past ten years grappled with issues of evil, and today reminds us that the human being is capable of atrocities that no animal could imagine. Indeed, Greene 's famous dictum that evil is a failure of the imagination is clever but sadly false - as is the idea that a lack of empathy is to blame - indeed, the deepest forms of evil require both imagination and empathy, in order to be executed with fully diabolical impact.  You cannot prudently hurt a creature you do not understand, except by accident. 70 years ago, the war against Japan ended. We have been reminded that during that war, among other barbarisms, Japanese medical doctors performed vivisection for medical students on Allied prisoners of war.  Human Vivisection is the worst crime imaginable - it is surgically altering a living sentient being for experimental purposes. I cannot describe these wretched and utterly degrading surgeries here properly, but medical students were forced to watc...

Philip Pullman is having a good time. His new book The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is out, and of course, launching it bang u p against Easter, the holiest week of the year for Christians, he is getting good press - which means sales. There's something tacky about that marketing stunt, like when Antichrist was launched on DVD at Christmas, which is not heroically atheist, but just capitalist-secular-shabby. Pullman, of course, is getting credit for shooting sacred cows (or fish) in a barrel . Surely, every theology student, and every teenager, has whimsically speculated on the possibility of a dark side to Jesus - a theme explored in The Last Temptation of Christ , for instance, to good effect. Nor is the idea that the Church wickedly betrayed the Jesus message new either - Dostoevsky made it the cornerstone of the Brothers Karamazov , one of the greatest of 19 th century novels. Only in the UK in the 21st century does it not seem anachronistic to have a donnish G...

Eyewear saw a little-heralded "stoner" indie movie that came and went last summer (2009) after a Sundance debut - Adventureland . Starring Kristen Stewart of Twilight infamy, and Jessie Eisenberg , of cult classic The Squid and The Whale , the film (on DVD) is actually a very sweet (and hilarious) coming of age story (with discussions of theology), set at the fag end of the Reagan 80s, in the dead-end summer job Purgatorio that is Adventureland: a sagging lo-fi amusement park that employs kids too broke to go to Europe, and divides them into a Games and a Rides cohort. Playing on the Schindler List trope that saw Schindler's quick rise through the fascist ranks due to his copious baskets of champagne, the main character is gifted with a magic stash of weed at the start of the film, and manages to ingratiate himself quickly with the theme park wastrels. Of these, the most touching is the loser Russian lit student, a beanpole four-eyes with alternative hair and a stunne...

Richard Harries , in today's Guardian Review , admirably and cleverly takes on Christopher Hitchens , whose new book is a direct frontal assault on religion and a belief in God. The main theme of all the recent anti-God tracts published in England and abroad is that man hands on misery to man, and that this deepening coastal shelf of pain was made by true believers - entirely ignoring the truth that the fact of man's wickedness is the best reason for the need for religion, not the best reason to assume it is yet another human evil. Religion - at its height - symbolizes the horizon at which the human finds possible perfection - hardly an aim worthy of such hack indignation... This at a time when Hypocrite-in-Chief Tony Blair has met the Pope in Rome, on his way to becoming a Catholic - an admirable road to take, but one which will be paved with the need for a great deal of soul-searching, or at least, forgiveness. Lying to the nation and helping to instigate an illegal war ar...

Q , the music bible with which Eyewear likes to quibble, recently suggested that Simple Minds was a guilty pleasure. They are not. Their album, New Gold Dream , is a shimmering masterpiece of new wave iconography from about a quarter century ago: from signal cover to its deeply-crafted songs that hint at Christology by way of Bonhoeffer, and still calls for attentive recovery. It is now time to establish it as a recognized classic. It is a wonder, all of a piece, this transcendent album, full of Kerr's whispers and new, resonant sounds. Each song builds on a crashing wave of revealed theology and subtle synth-sound - from the alliterative call-and-response of "someone somewhere in summertime" to the promised miracles, to the dark-night-of-the-soul doubt of "Big Sleep" to the redemptive, eschatoligical fervour that is the bold title track's luscious line: "she is your friend" (that wondrous promise still makes me swoon - oh to hold her hand). Each...