catapult magazine

I am currently involved in a Rep. Theatre course her at dordt college, which will eventually be heading out on tour with the Pacific Northwest as our ultimate destination, making stops along the way. We are taking a long one act play called “an appearance of the blessed virgin at a brookline health clinc.” IT deals with several issues, mainly abortion, with an “oops pregnant girl” dealing with what to do juxa posed against the appearance of gabriel to Mary and the whiole christmas story. Our goal is to appraoch from a very post-modern view, using Anne Bogarts viewpoints.
Anyway, one of the things we are doing is as a company exploring every possible resource for ideas of things we can explore, and i have chosen to look into the concept of angels, another issue the play deals with, and i was just wondering what people on this site thought about angels, and if anyone has any good suggestions for reaources and perspectives into the subject.
thanks.

It seems like art is always more effective at protraying evil than good. Movies like “The Devil’s Advocate” (if you don’t want disturbingly evil images etched in your brain, don’t see this one) and “Seven” give a realistic and bone-chilling version of evil.

While good has… Frodo. or good guys who are even nastier than the villains (Van Damme, Willis, Segal, etc.). Good triumphs by being more violent and deceptive than the bad guys.

Daniel 10 talks about how the angel Gabriel fought demons for three weeks (with the help of Michael) to give Daniel a message while he was praying and fasting. There’s a lot we don’t understand about a perfect and loving God who’s also a warrior.

I’m fascinated by these frightening warrior angels who we might entertain without knowing it.

I know we’re talking angels and not heros — but Frodo (I think) bears much resemblence to those flawed biblical heros like Moses and Paul and Peter. Some good flawed heros in the Narnia books too.

Here’s something. A play called Halo, by Josh MacDonald.

“When an image of Jesus appears on the side of a Tim Horton’s restaurant in Nately, Nova Scotia, life is forever changed. The town’s inhabitants are challenged to ask difficult questions about faith, life and love with sometimes moving, sometimes hilarious results. Complicating the matter, of course, are the more mundane questions of whether this appearance is a miracle, an accident, or a quite possibly even a hoax.”

More at this link:
http://www.talonbooks.com/Books/halo.html

Sounds like an interesting play — especially the Tim Hortons angle (I’ve always suspected…). Anybody read it?

On a related note, “Jesus Hopped the A-Train” is an excellent story of an accused murderer finding faith (of a sort) in prison. It is truthful to the prison milyeu, though, so some of the language is a bit rough.

No angels in it, though.

I knew there was something strangely compelling about Tim Horton’s when I visited Vancouver, BC this summer…

There’s a good tangent to be had about heros, but I prefer to mention more obscure biblical references to angels, only because they came up in my quiet time yesterday.

“The Nephilim were on the earth in those days— and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were heroes of old, men of renown.” Gen 6: 4

which led me to

“…He (Christ) was put to death in the body but made alive by the Spirit, through whom also he went and preached to the spirits in prison who disobeyed long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all were saved through water.”
I Peter 3:18-20

Talk about tangents, Peter! My curiosity of the Nephilim led my roommate to search the internet on it and found that there were X-Files type groups that were waiting hopefully for the Nephilim to return as well as anti-Nephilim task forces!

Sorry if I’m the only one that finds this interesting, but the best I can understand these passages (with the help of text notes) is that evil angels (“sons of God”) were having children with earth women (“daughters of men”) which I don’t totally understand, since angels and demons are spirit beings.
That would help explain the quick spread of depravity of the earth and God’s wrath with the Flood.

The second passage is interesting b/c it’s one a Mormon used on me in his argument for their version of purgatory. I had never seen the passage before and was completely flummoxed. My understanding is it is referring to Christ’s triumph in Hades and him preaching to them a message of his victory and making a spectacle of them. The pronouns make it confusing, but the eight saved would refer to Noah, Shem, Ham, Japeth and wives, not the evil angels Christ was preaching to, as Mormons would argue.

I promise, I’m done with obscure angel references… until the next one…

Don’t be done! The Nephilim are an incredibly interesting conversation piece. When you start digging and realize that the world around Noah was entirely corrupt due to the Nephillim and that Noah and his family wre the only remainding humans of pure lineage…you start to understand why God had to destroy the inhabitants of the world. When you realize that the Nephillim were a plot of Satan to destroy the lineage of Christ, and that once again God protected the “entrance” to salvation by flooding the earth, you start to see that maybe God isn’t as heartless and ruthless as we sometimes wonder He might be.

An interesting link to a textual study on the subject:

http://www.khouse.org/articles/biblestudy/19970801-110.html

Finally got around to reading the article and I must say it was fascninating. Having just read Joshua and Judges, that sheds new light on their conquest and is another powerful illustration of physical things in the OT resembling spiritual things in the NT and our time.

Thanks, Jabird!!