This has turned into a fine example of why some bloggers don’t enable comments.

http://www.angelfire.com/ny5/pinstripepress/PPBlog/

If anyone wants to address his comments, please do so on his site.

I appreciate your sentiments regarding my response, Kevin. While I’m sure it’s not your intent, I don’t want to see this turn into one of those ugly comments feature arguments that flare up in the blogosphere. It has never happened on Bull Runnings, and I want to keep it that way.

Thanks for taking the time to coment, and I hope your post-op is progressing well.

I guess I’ll have to take your word for the filmakers’ intent. Other than a statement on the DVD case – “Now, his legacy as a man of resolute Christian character is captured in this revealing documentary” – I didn’t find a clear definition of the “non-secular” focus. Your statement “If you are a believer, or searching for examples of how faith impacts people, ‘Still Standing’ will be just what you are looking for” seems to imply that if you don’t find this film to be what you are looking for, you are either a non-believer, or not searching for those examples, or both.

With the exception of the paradox of Jackson in the Valley vs. Jackson in the Seven Days, the other paradoxes introduced but unexplored in the film all seem to be of a non-secular or moral nature. (I didn’t manufacture these, BTW, all I did was connect the dots between the evidence presented in the film.) Did Jackson “know what love was”, or didn’t he? Was he abnormally motivated by personal ambition? Was he a lonely loner, or was his childhood shaped by friendships? Why was he willfully disobedient to the laws of Virginia when it came to educating blacks, but subservient when it came to the legality of slavery? Is the exploration of these contradictions somehow the domain of either the secular world, or the non-secular world? Is there absolutely no overlap?

As I said in the review, “[p]erhaps a case can be made that for his time and community Jackson was in fact progressive in his views on and treatment of slaves and free blacks.” This film does not really try to make that case. If such an attempt was not in accordance with the film makers’ vision, I think maybe it should have been. Perhaps how Jackson’s faith, as he practiced it, and how it affected his views on slavery, and how it differed or was similar to how others in the wide world practiced their faith, would have been instructive for believers and non-believers as well. I don’t think this is a case of “either/or”.

While the review of this DVD did present challenges to me, its non-secular nature, as you describe it, was not one of them. And I’ll repeat, whether or not this film is “for you” depends on what you’re looking for.