All Wedding, All The Time

Just when you thought that I might get back to talking about what makes exegetical research so hard, or about the non-consent to the election of the so-called Buddhist Bishop, or about apologetic statesmen of a compromising kind, I break out yet another wedding-related link. This is a slide montage of images taken by Peter Coombs, the professional photographer for the Harris-Adam wedding (about whom we can’t rave enthusiastically enough):
 

 
Margaret and I went to see Angels and Demons this afternoon, out of a sense of academic obligation. To be entirely fair, it was better than the preceding film, and both were better than the book of The da Vinci Code (I haven’t read the preceding book); and early on, the film seemed to make an arch comment about the intellectual seriousness of “symbology.” Still, the sheer preposterousness of the plot contrasts jarringly with the humorless didacticism of the main character. The Harvard Professor of Symbology has to be told, toward the end of the film, that a symbol might have another meaning! The action of the movie takes such vast liberties with the duration of time that a viewer must simply give up all sense of regularized chronology. Ewan MacGregor played his part well, as did Armin Mueller-Stahl. Still, the crowning incoherence of this exercise in earnest erroneousness comes from the fact that Robert Langdon, the spokesperson for Enlightenment in the film, reaches his conclusions by outlandish speculations, wild guesses, dogmatic (un-evidenced) assertions, and condescending patter. In that respect, Langdon serves as a fitting Mary Sue to the novel’s author, Dan Brown.

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