Morning Musings

For some bizarre reason, I can't get one of the commercials for the latest Will Ferrell movie out of my brain. It's a stupid, stupid commercial, and there's no way on the face of the earth I'd ever go to see it. I wouldn't even pay money to rent it. Besides the fact that I don't particularly care for Ferrell as an actor, the commercial shows that the premise and the acting are outrageously over the top. I simply don't waste good time or money on movies like that.

Yet I can almost tell you that the moral of the story will be of redeeming value, involving overcoming prejudice and triumphing over hatreds and biases. So maybe the movie itself will accomplish something that a more subtle telling of a similar story wouldn't.

If you don't know what movie I'm talking about, it's the one where two male figure skating rivals attack each other, are permanently banned from "men's figure skating", and then find a loophole to compete together in pairs. I figure (no pun intended) that the finale of the movie will be them skating the perfect routine and wowing the judges, thus forcing the judges to declare them the winners, to the ultimate adoration of the crowds they've won over. Actually, there's a part of me that wouldn't mind seeing something like that in real life. (Well, not the vicious rivalry and fighting part, but a well-matched pair, regardless of gender.)

Anyway, that earworm of a commercial got me to thinking about the tv show Scrubs. When it first came on, I tried to watch it once or twice. ACK! I absolutely detest such obviously cartoon-like acting. Five minutes, tops, was all I managed. Then my son came home. He likes the show. Being an adult and deciding to act that way, I "suffered" through it ... and have discovered some redeeming value in the process. There's generally a fairly solid life message embedded in the stories told, the kind of message that encourages relationship and growth and acknowledgement of our humanity. Scrubs will probably not rest on my "Top 10 Favorite TV Shows" list, but perhaps I've gotten past a bit of my own bias and prejudice in the process.

You still won't catch me paying money or wasting time to see the Will Ferrell movie!

Then, my eye was caught by a billboard for a local Christian academy, and I began to wonder if there exist any Christian schools that operate from a liberal theology. And, if not, then why haven't liberal Christians started any? There certainly aren't any in this neck of the Bible Belt.

Arriving at home, I pulled out the trusty Google search engine (at any rate, the more familiar to me Google search engine - we at least tend to think alike when searching). First, I tried "Christian school" and liberal. After getting umpty-thousand hits and looking at the first page or two, began shedding entries with words like "arts" and "college" in them. Still too many hits. And most of the ones in the first pages were conservative Christian school diatribes against liberal thought.

That wasn't working. Next tack - "liberal Christian school". That got me to a more manageable 174 hits. However, on the first two pages, most of the hits were either references to colleges or were commentary against liberal Christian schools. If you delete all references to college, you end up with 4 hits, and none of those had to do with actual places of education, but rather the "liberal Christian school of thought" or the like.

Either there aren't any, which probably isn't the case, or they choose not to identify themselves as liberal. Perhaps there's something oxymoronic about the term "liberal Christian school". In any case, it's something for me to ponder at a later date.