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Streaming Picks

Sherlock fans: the wait is over! Netflix began streaming season 3 of the BBC show on Monday. Bonus: they've included three additional "Sherlock Uncovered" episodes, in which you'll get a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the show.

Want to share a piece of your childhood with your kids for this week's movie night? Amazon Prime is also now streaming Felix the Cat: The Platinum Collection.

For a throwback to the romantic antics of Humphrey Bogart and the magnificent Audrey Hepburn, watch Sabrina, also on Amazon Prime.

And if history and subtitles are more your thing, check out Soong Sisters—free for Amazon Prime Users—which follows three women who married three of the most influential Chinese leaders of all time.

Critics Roundup

PluggedIn's Adam R. Holz says that although Chef begins with a narcissistic, food-obsessed man, it ends with a beautiful portrait of what a father-son relationship should look like: "By journey's end, Carl has become a more engaged and emotionally healthy dad who's learned to love and work with his young son." Despite the heart-warming conclusion, Holz believes the language and comedy style of the film is far too filthy for a family-oriented film. Holz is not lost on the irony that, "Carl rebukes Percy for using bad language but of course uses it himself in front of his son." Although Holz could not see past the vulgarity of Chef, The New York Times' Stephen Holden seems to have seen a completely different movie. Holden praises Chef for its accurate depiction of the world today, saying "Food trucks, Twitter wars and salsa music: Chef has its pinkie on the pulse of the moment." The only negative remarks Holden seems to have about Chef is that it's more of a "glorified travelogue" than an actual film and despite its diversity-fueled cast, "the movie's exploration of multiculturalism isn't any deeper than that of an average episode of Modern Family."

This week, NBC welcomed a new Friday night television series starring John Malkovich. Although Blackbeard was created by Neil Cross, famous for BBC's Luther, PluggedIn's Paul Asay believes it cannot compare. Asay—whose review is written entirely in Pirate-lingo, mind you—claims, "Lookin' at Crossbones through me one good eye, methinks it a miserable pursuit, not fit for lad nor lass." Asay also observed that the show is full "o'scurvy behavior," and that pirates swearing like sailors is the least of their crude conduct. The New York Times' Neil Genzlinger avoids over-dramatic pirate vernacular in his review, and apparently so does the show. He praises this decision, informing us that the writers "avoid the 'ahoy, matey' stuff (these pirates spend most of their time on dry land) and instead make sure to give their characters, especially Blackbeard, a decent ration of smart dialogue in each episode." Genzlinger strongly disagrees with Asay's warning to dismiss the show, stating that Crossbones is a "sophisticated, well-acted television for a warm-weather series."

Movie News

More additions to the cast of J.J. Abram's Star Wars: Episode VII have been announced this week. Game of Thrones' Gwendoline Christie and Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave actress Lupita Nyong'o will both appear in the upcoming film. For more information, read here.

Lucasfilm and Disney have also just announced that Josh Trank, famously re-doing The Fantastic Four, will direct a standalone Star Wars film. Read more here.

Fans of Divergent should look forward to seeing Naomi Watts alongside Shailene Woodley for the remaining book-to-movie sequels. Variety is reporting that Watts will play Evelyn in Liongate's upcoming Insurgent and Allegiant films.

Hate watching movies on your phone? Indiewire is reporting that a new Danish film created specifically for your phone screen will be released in the United States this Friday. APP is the first movie created for your phone.

Larisa Kline is a summer intern with Christianity Today Movies and a student at The King's College in New York City.

Since his release on Saturday, white-hot controversy has dogged US Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was exchanged for five senior Taliban leaders. The Taliban held him captive for the past five years. Bergdahl is being branded as a deserter for abandoning his unit in eastern Afghanistan.

On Sunday at a White House press conference, President Obama with Bergdahl's parents Robert and Jani at his side announced Bowe's release. Earlier this week, Phil Proctor, pastor of Sterling Presbyterian Church, an Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Sterling, Virginia, began distributing an email in response to questions he was receiving about the Bergdahls since he served as their pastor and has remained close to the family. In the five years since Bergdahl's capture, there has been a nationwide campaign for his release with many posters describing Sgt. Bergdahl as a POW.

Proctor said he wrote the email to counter false reports about the Bergdahl family, including that the father had become a Muslim. Right now, Bergdahl is being treated in a military hospital in Germany and the date of his return to the US is unclear. Washington-based journalist Sheryl Blunt spoke with Proctor earlier this week. The interview has been edited for clarity.

After serving as an interim pastor at the Bergdahls' church in Boise, you served as a missionary in Uganda and kept in touch with them. How close were you to the family?

We stayed in touch with different people in the congregation. When we would come back on furlough, we would get together with people and the Bergdahls were among those we would get together with regularly. In 2011, I took the congregation here in Sterling.

If Bowe was a deserter, I'll be the first to send him a care package in prison.

Providentially, Bob and Jani were traveling in and out of the DC area and so it became a great opportunity for them to stay with us when they were passing through.

After the Taliban freed Bowe, you spoke with both parents. What did they say?

We just rejoiced together in God's mercies. We talked about the media response and their intention of keeping quiet. We prayed together thanking God for his mercies to Bowe and asking for continued protection and healing.

How do you respond to the hostile reactions among some conservative Christians?

This whole thing is the dog of politics wagging the tail of the conservative Christian conversation. Folks are failing to recognize that this is a political football and was from the beginning.

The Bergdahls are just the flavor of the week, and next week it's going to be a different scandal. That's politics. But these are brothers and sisters in Christ. We can have political views on whether Bowe should be in prison, or whether Bob should say the Arabic version of "shalom," but to adopt the rhetoric of the day and use it to guide conversations among Christians about another self-professed Christian–I'm saddened by that.

We live in the grace of God and as we are immersed over and over again in appreciation of his grace to us in Christ; it lives out in peaceful relationships. I would hope that we as believers can be more eager to pursue peace.

Do you believe Bowe is a deserter?

I honestly don't know. Whatever happened–if we saw a Christian couple whose daughter had gotten pregnant or whose son got caught with a bunch of cocaine, we would cry with them and we would help them to walk through the valley.

If this kid made a huge, stupid mistake, that's for the magistrates to figure out, to look at the evidence and to talk to the witnesses.

Right now, we're watching a lynch mob, and Christians are getting engaged in the lynching. In any other situation, we'd be hugging the parents and weeping with them.

What prompted the email you shared?

I'm being asked specifically if Bob is some kind of secret Muslim. People were saying, "The father is a Muslim, look at his beard. Look how he gets up in front of the White House and says one of the opening verses of the Qur'an."

What's been the response of your own congregation in Virgina?

Supportive. We've been praying for Bob and Jani and they've visited our church. I couldn't be more thankful for the way my congregation is handling this. Others have contacted me, saying, "Pass the word on to Bob and Jani that we love them and we're praying for them."

How are the Bergdahls handling all the controversy?

They are hunkered down, and their [mindset] is, "We're just going to thank God that our son who was lost is found, that our son who was dead is alive, and look forward to the day we can hold our son again."

Did Bowe ever discuss his faith with you?

He was at a stage in his life where he was wanting to know if it was his faith or if it was his parents' faith–a young adult kind of thing. He was very intelligent. He wasn't rebellious at all.

Did he ever make a profession of faith?

He did not make a public profession of faith. We were working through that pastorally, and working through this questioning period, and whether he ever got to the place of saying, "Yes, this is my commitment," I don't know. While he was in captivity, he made a point of celebrating Christmas and Easter, and asked his captors to join in with him in celebrating, and I find that profoundly significant.

How would you describe Bowe's personality?

He's intelligent and very well read. His parents are rugged individualists, intelligent, outdoors kind of people. Bowe is the kind of person who'd build his own house, then sit down and read Socrates in the evening by firelight.

How did you minister to Bob and Jani while their son was gone?

Bob's continual communication with me was expressing fear and discouragement, but always coming back to God's sovereignty in this. He believed that God is guiding Bowe through this, that God is protecting Bowe. That was his comfort. He would say that Sundays were one of his most encouraging days because that was the day he knew that people all around the world were praying for Bowe specifically.

How would you like to see the Christian community respond?

There's the parable of the prodigal son. To me, that is a striking parallel. The prodigal son has come home. The elder brother, the faithful son, at the end of Luke 15, is the one standing out alone in the night, and the father leaves the house and goes to the elder brother and says, "Won't you come in and rejoice with us?" I hope that we, the Christian community, could make a distinction between politics and between such offenses.

If Bowe was a deserter, I'll be the first to send him a care package in prison. There has to be a fundamental level at which we can just come around a brother and sister in the Lord, whose son has been held captive by the Taliban for five years, and wrap our arms around them, and cry, and give them a kiss. That doesn't align me with any political party. It doesn't make me spit in the face of soldiers who may have died looking for Bowe. I'm not getting into any of that. If there are criminal things that have happened, by all means, let's have a trial, there's a law system for that. But this is a lynch mob that's happening right now.

What bothers you the most about the responses you've seen?

If you put a bandana on Bob Bergdahl's head and put a duck in his hand, we'd put pictures of him on our walls in our Christian homes. We'd be defending him tooth and nail. Yet here we are saying, "Because he's got a beard, he's a Muslim.' And, "Look he said, Bism allah al-rahman al-raheem [In the name of Allah, the most graceful and merciful] at the White House. He claimed it for Muhammad! This was a secret infiltration thing."

To attack Bob because he has done and said things that are outside of our comfort zone as he's tried to do whatever he could to get his son back, we need to be more gracious. Which one of us is ready to cast that first stone? I don't know what I would have done if it was my son over there. I know Bob has, through the years, professed his faith in Christ and his reliance upon Christ. He's a brother in the Lord and we need to pray with him and love him.

There are accusations flying wildly right now. If, at the end of the day, Bowe collaborated with the enemy, by all means let the young man stand in front of a judge. But I don't know, and they don't know.

Did Bob and Jani express to you how they felt about their son being exchanged for five senior members of the Taliban?

They were expecting the uproar. Bob has been very active for years in saying that Bowe's release has to be connected to people leaving Guantanamo. Bob has been politically dogmatic saying that Guantanamo needs to be closed. Bob hasn't been quiet about it. Bob has said, "We've got to close Guantanamo in order to get Bowe home."

What is your hope in all of this?

What I'm trying to do is pour oil on troubled waters to call Christians back to focus on these brothers and sisters in Christ. We need to show mercy here.

Sheryl Blunt is a journalist based in Washington, D.C.

As Edge of Tomorrow begins, aliens have taken over most of Europe. Lieutenant Cage (Tom Cruise) is an American military spokesman forced into combat by a general (Brendan Gleeson) for reasons not made entirely clear. (Something to do with the general's fear that media manipulators such as Cage will make him the fall-guy if the human troop surge is unsuccessful.)

Cage has somehow achieved the rank of lieutenant without receiving any combat training or even learning how to turn the safety off on his weapon, so everyone in his group expects him to die quickly on history's second D-Day. When the battle arrives, he does manage to stay alive long enough to cross paths with super-soldier Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt). She has been labeled the "Angel of Verdun," because she displayed nearly god-like skills in killing aliens at a previous battle.

As Cage is sprayed with alien blood, he appears to be dying. But then he suddenly wakes up—at the invasion's launching base on the morning of the attack. From there, he has to figure out why he is in a purgatorial time loop and how he can use his seemingly endless supply of lives to formulate the perfect plan to defeat the aliens.

Novelist Ursula K. Le Guin once suggested that in the best science fiction, the author should be allowed one reality-bending premise and then judged on how skillfully she can follow that premise's own internal logic. In Edge of Tomorrow, it is not the time-travel loop that is so hard to accept.

But it's harder to bear how the film fuses its sci-fi premise with an action movie's sensibility: one in which the characters become living, breathing video-game avatars, rather than human beings. And that doesn't work for this movie—because of the movie's own premise.

In the film's problematic second act, Rita tries to hide personal information from Cage because, as she reasons, the more you see another soldier as another human being, the harder it is to watch her (or him) die. The film tries to leverage this in the third act, but fails—largely because it never bothers to make either of these characters people or show their bond deepening. Instead, it loops through the battle scenes to show Cage's progress, suggestiing he is accumulating experience through montages in which Rita casually shoots her partner after each training session to "reset" the day.

In a very telling third act moment, Cage—weary from having lived the same day over and over—simply doesn't push a fellow soldier out of death's way. The screening audience howled with glee. Who cares, right? It's not as if, even in the movie's world, this grunt were a consequential person who was really, actually dead.

More than simply a joke that misfires, that scene is, I would argue, the film's most unintentionally honest moment and the one in which it becomes the very antithesis of the comedy classic it is so clearly invoking: Groundhog Day.

In that movie, Phil (Bill Murray) also had to learn to live his day right in order to escape it. But "right" meant something more than simply cracking the cosmic video game sequence of moves. He had to learn (and apply) a moral lesson.

Edge of Tomorrow is much more liberal than was Groundhog Day in its use of religious language; Master Sargent Farrell (Bill Paxton) ironically prophesies that it is on the field of battle that Cage will be baptized and "born again." But this turns out to be all clever punning and nothing more, irony for irony's sake. You should drop any hope that the nearness of death will lead to insights about the meaning and value of life.

The invitations to laugh at death end up backfiring, though. By removing even the possibility of death for most of the movie, the plot strips any decision of meaningful consequences. This comes as no surprise to anyone who has read any postmodern literature or even, say, the book of Ecclesiastes. The result is not a mindset that clings to life as something precious, but one that cavalierly dismisses it as something absurd and meaningless.

Tellingly, Rita asks "What does it matter what happens to me?" And Cage, and the film, can think of no answer.

(This conundrum is compounded by the incomprehensible epilogue, about which I can only say, without spoilers, that it appears to change the rules that supposedly applied to every scene before it.)

There are some slivers of entertainment here and there. Blunt is good, an unexpectedly plausible action heroine. Bill Paxton gives a marvelous little performance, made all the more delicious because his character is exactly the opposite of his career-launching role as Private Hudson in Aliens. Cruise, while clearly more comfortable in the film's back half (once Cage turns heroic), is still our best action movie actor, seemingly ageless, and capable of playing essentially the same character in film after film, using his undeniable charm and charisma to carry us past some really poor writing.

If it is hard to put aside the film's artistic and thematic deficiencies and simply enjoy it as a summer "things go boom" movie, perhaps that is because one hopes (although it is an increasingly faint hope) in something more from Doug Liman. Twelve years ago, Liman helmed The Bourne Identity, one of the best action thrillers of our generation. Like Edge of Tomorrow, it paired a seemingly indestructible male hero with an all-too-vulnerable female accomplice. Unlike Liman's subsequent genre films (Edge of Tomorrow, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and Jumper) it had a bottomless melancholy, which sprung from its Bourne's growing ambivalence towards violence and horror at his own ability to dispense it without consequence.

When an actor or director makes a movie that good, I usually say I'll get in line for his or her next three projects, no questions asked. Edge of Tomorrow didn't persuade me to give up on Liman, but it did reset my own anticipation meter for his next film back to zero. Bourne is starting to look an awful lot like the outlier in his filmography.

Caveat Spectator

The bulk of Edge of Tomorrow's PG-13 rating comes from military violence. At least one soldier uses an excremental adjective when expressing disbelief, and there is a quick shot of male buttocks played for humor. A soldier has a ship fall out of the sky and crushes him. Another is splattered with alien blood, causing his face to melt. Another soldier is shown (in the background) on fire. Vehicle crashes and explosions abound. The depiction of violence is less explicit and gruesome than an average episode of Game of Thrones, but it is pervasive and perhaps the more desensitizing for being divorced from any material suffering.

Kenneth R. Morefield is an Associate Professor of English at Campbell University. He is the editor of Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema, Volumes I & II, and the founder of 1More Film Blog.

Near the end of The Fault in Our Stars there's a scene in a church where three teenage "cancer kids" gather to perform a fake funeral, delivering eulogies for one another. One is blind, one's in a wheelchair, and one has an oxygen tank.

Each is keenly aware of their finitude and the reality of death. Each is familiar with suffering. Life is not as they wished it would be—but it is what it is.

The scene is a tearjerker but also breezy and funny, carrying both the horror of "oblivion" (as one character refers to it) and the ecstasy of life in one full heart. It's a tone that defines the movie generally. As a star-crossed teenage love story, it's neither too cynical nor too sappy. It's existentially burdened but also cheerfully in the moment, concerned with the biggest of questions but also (perhaps mostly) with the here and now.

The film, directed by Josh Boone, is first and foremost a love story between Hazel Grace (Shailene Woodley) and Augustus (Ansel Elgort), teenagers with terminal cancer who meet in a support group. Much like last year's The Spectacular Now, which also starred Woodley, Stars captures beautifully the innocence and frailty of adolescent love, haunted as it is by the specter of impermanence. In this case the pressure of now is even greater, however, as death could come swiftly for either one of them.

At one point, the pair goes to Amsterdam for a Make-a-Wish-Foundation trip to visit the reclusive author (Willem Dafoe) of Hazel's favorite novel, An Imperial Affliction (an Infinite Jest-esque work). The connection between Hazel and Augustus is forged most deeply in this time abroad, in a way that reminded me a bit of Lost in Translation. Indeed, Sofia Coppola's 2003 film captured a mood of impermanence—a clinging to the "spectacular now" amidst the uncertainty, lost-ness, and frenetic pace of the technologized life—that resonated deeply with a generation and set the tone for post-9/11 cinema.

Our era is defined by what Douglas Rushkoff called "present shock." It's the most now-minded time in history, bound as we are to instant messaging, Insta-gram, 1-click shopping, and an always-on, live-streamed exposure to anything and everything happening now.

The "shock" of the present overwhelms us and leaves us longing for a bigger picture—those quaint relics we used to call metanarratives—or at least a cataclysmic ending, suggests Rushkoff, which is why apocalyptic and zombie media narratives are more popular than ever. Our awareness of death and the more-probable-than-ever demise of the planet (and in a weird way, our longing for it) leaves us with a #YOLO embrace of life while we have it.

Of course, this takes a few different forms. In a spate of recent films, Millennial YOLO life looks nihilistic, at best: Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers; Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring; Gia Coppola's Palo Alto.

Thankfully The Fault in Our Stars presents a more nuanced and healthy manifestation of YOLO—one that is less oriented toward reckless self-gratification and more concerned with loving others.

Stars is based on the best-selling book by John Green, a young adult fiction author who is also a "generational voice" of sorts, with a massive following on his YouTube vlog, Tumblr, and the like. He grasps the language, media habits, cynicism and idealism of Millennials in a way that feels neither awkward nor condescending.

In books like Stars, Green wagers that young people aren't just selfie-obsessed technology zombies, but people with souls and inklings toward the transcendent. His highly quotable writing is great fodder for inspirational tweets, Pinterest boards, and BuzzFeed lists, filling a need for a glimpse of some higher meaning amidst the maelstrom of over-mediation.

Green has made no secret of his Christian faith. Before he became a writer he wanted to be a minister. After studying literature and philosophy at Kenyon College, he applied to divinity school but instead got a job as a chaplain at an Ohio children's hospital.

During the six months that he worked there, Green struggled to reconcile the reality of evil with the ostensible omniscience of God. "All the reading I'd done, it meant nothing," he said in a recent interview. "No idea could hold up in the face of this reality. I was with actual children and actual families, and their kids were dying, and it was just devastating."

Stars is in part a film about this question of all questions: why does suffering exist, and why does it seem so arbitrary and unequally dispersed? The title is a nod to Julius Caesar ("the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves") but an inversion of it. Green suggests that the "fault" is with the stars, or with God, and that it's a mystery and seeming injustice that we must accept. Why does someone like Anne Frank have to die so horribly and at such a young age? The film addresses the question directly when Hazel (in one of the film's more on-the-nose moments) visits the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam.

And yet Stars doesn't get bogged down in theodicy. At the end of the day it accepts suffering as an inevitability of life, something that touches all, even the greatest men who ever lived. Even God.

It's no coincidence that in one of the earliest scenes of the film, a support group of sick teenagers meets in a church and sit in a circle surrounding a homemade "sacred heart of Jesus" rug. They've come together quite literally around the heart of Jesus, which is to say the heart of suffering. The scene made me think of Christian Wiman's My Bright Abyss, a book that also wrestles with the scourge of suffering, cancer and death but finds comfort in the cross.

"I am a Christian because of that moment on the cross when Jesus, drinking the very dregs of human bitterness, cries out, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" writes Wiman. "He felt human destitution to its absolute degree; the point is that God is with us, not beyond us, in suffering."

Stars never touches the cross (or the resurrection) directly, even though Hazel and Augustus have vague conversations about God and the afterlife. On one hand it's a shame, given how profound it can be to have Christ with us in our suffering. Yet it also feels honest to where Hazel and Augustus are at and what they think they need. The abstractions of metaphysics and theology are no comfort in their final days; the tangible touch of a loved one is.

One of Hazel's key lines in the film is "some infinities are bigger than other infinities." It's her way of pointing out the incomprehensibility of what we call "infinity." We can't know such a thing in this life, at least not like we can know the now, the right in front of us. Yet something—our unquenchable curiosity, our soul's restlessness, the vastness of a star-filled sky—tells us we'll understand infinity one day.

Caveat Spectator

The Fault in Our Stars is rated PG-13 for some language, as well as one scene of sexuality involving teenagers (no nudity). A few scenes feature teenagers drinking and fake-smoking. The film's themes (namely: death, cancer, human finitude) are pretty heavy, but there's also plenty of humor to balance things out. In general it's a cleaner-than-average PG-13 film that depicts adolescents as more mature and innocent than we're used to seeing.

Brett McCracken is a Los Angeles-based writer and journalist, and author of the books Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide (Baker, 2010) and Gray Matters: Navigating the Space Between Legalism and Liberty (Baker, 2013). You can follow him @brettmccracken.

At the World Cup opening ceremony next week in São Paulo, a paralyzed Brazilian will walk onto the field and kick the ceremonial first ball. The young man or woman will be aided by the newest iteration in a line of mind-controlled exoskeletons—if everything goes according to plan. The pilot will wear a 3D-printed helmet and a concealed cap of electrodes. All he or she needs to do is think about the necessary movements, and "the brain–machine interface will convert human intent into robotic motion," The Atlantic reported.

Duke University neuroscientist and Brazilian native Miguel Nicolelis is leading the initiative, and he and his team are working frantically to prepare for the exoskeleton's debut. Nicolelis told the BBC, "This is just the beginning. . . . Our proposal was always to demonstrate the technology in the World Cup as the first, symbolic step of a new approach in the care of patients with paralysis."

However, critics are dubious the exoskeleton will be capable of everything Nicolelis and his team are promising. So far, mind-controlled exoskeletons have only been able to send "start" and "stop" signals. Andrew Schwartz, a neuroprosthetics researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, told MIT Technology Review, "Everything you'll see in the demo will be fancy robotics, not brain control, and it will probably all be preprogrammed." And Tim Vogels, a computational and theoretical neuroscientist at Oxford University, told The Atlantic, "Do I see any hurdles? There are tons of them, right? There are only hurdles."

I never cease to be amazed at the ingenuity God has given us humans. We use this gift not only to imitate his beautiful creativity, but also to overcome limitations, like Nicolelis and his team are attempting to do. When we see a problem, we work hard to solve it. It's what we do. Sure, other creatures have the ability to problem-solve. But humans are unrivaled in their dexterity. Even as we continue to make incredible progress in defying limitations, however, we will never be able to escape hurdles. And there are some things we just can't do as humans. There is always something beyond our reach, problems we can't solve, barriers we cannot break. The hard, cold facts of life reinforce that. And so does Pentecost.

More than Charismata and Mission

In a 2007 edition of Newsweek magazine, author and radio personality Garrison Keillor was asked to choose the five most important books of all time. He surprised some readers by ranking the Book of Acts at the top of his list. "The flames lit on their little heads," he wrote, "and bravely and dangerously went they onward."

Keillor was right about the importance of Acts, for it spotlights the work of the Holy Spirit. It's not that the Holy Spirit was absent before Pentecost. Scripture shows the Spirit working at the beginning of creation (Gen. 1:2), elsewhere in Old Testament history, and in the Gospels. But Acts accents the work of the Spirit in an entirely new way.

Luke, the author of Acts, tells us that on the day of Pentecost, the disciples were gathered together in one place. We don't know exactly what they were doing. They could have been eating, socializing, or praying. Then suddenly "a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting" (2:2). They were "filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them" (2:3).

If you've grown up in church or been a Christian for very long, chances are you know the rest of the story. It's a Christian hallmark, the tale of the "church's birth." The disciples spoke in unlearned tongues, and onlookers—God-fearing Jews who had come to Jerusalem from surrounding nations—heard their own languages being spoken. Everyone marveled. Some thought the disciples were crazy, even drunk. "Why are these goons babbling about so liberally and audaciously?" people must have wondered. Then Peter, the lead apostle, stood up and addressed the crowd. He preached about Christ, the resurrected and ascended Lord, and called his hearers to repent. Three thousand people were saved and baptized on the spot. The Spirit empowered a minority "sect" to carry out Christ's call: to make disciples and baptize them (Matt. 28:20).

At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit ushered in a new era, one in which the promises of God have become a reality. In his sermon, Peter indicated that the words of the prophet Joel had been fulfilled: "In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people."

When most of us think about Pentecost, we think of charismata and mission. But Pentecost is about more than just spectacular signs and church growth. As important as these are, they emerge from and point to a more profound event: The Spirit's breaking down the major barriers of our lives and in human history.

Completion and Application of Redemption

Pentecost was essentially a harvest festival, and it fell on the 50th day after Passover. For Israel, it signified the end of the reaping season and completed the Passover offering. But Pentecost isn't just a Jewish holiday. The apostle Paul, even after he became a Christian, celebrated the Feast of Pentecost (Acts 20:16). So why is it significant for Christians? One key reason is it marks the completion and application of Christ's redemptive work.

Throughout history, Christians have recognized the connection between Passover and Christ's death. Passover, which commemorates Israel's liberation from Egypt, anticipates the freedom from sin and death we receive by Christ's sacrificial death on the cross. His resurrection gives us new life, and his ascension into heaven obtains for us eternal redemption (Heb. 9:11–12).

Just as Passover foreshadowed Christ's sacrificial death, so Pentecost foreshadowed the completion of Christ's saving work. In other words, Christ's "reaping"—the culmination of his labor—is carried out by the Spirit's descent at Pentecost. The Spirit applies all the benefits of Christ's death and resurrection to our lives. The Spirit raises us from the dead (Rom. 8:11), justifies us (1 Cor. 6:11), and sanctifies us (2 Thess. 2:13).

There is no barrier between us and the effects of Christ's work. Christ lived, died, and rose again two millennia ago, but the Spirit extends the effects of those events to us, even in the 21st century.

Christians have historically affirmed the inseparable link between the Spirit and the Word. Jesus, the Word of God, has accomplished our salvation, and the Spirit is the one who applies the benefits of Christ's work to us as individual believers. That means there is no barrier between us and the effects of Christ's work. Christ lived, died, and rose again two millennia ago, but the Spirit extends the effects of those events to us, even in the 21st century.

Union with God

As a result of the Spirit's descent, we are no longer separated from God. Sure, in Christ, humanity and divinity are forever united. And to be clear, the Incarnation has made possible our re-union with God. But as individuals, we are isolated from God until his Spirit penetrates our lives and takes residence in our hearts. As New Testament scholar James D. G. Dunn explains, "In one sense, therefore, Pentecost can never be repeated—the new age is here, and cannot be ushered in again. But in another sense . . . the experience of Pentecost can and must be repeated in the experience of all who would become Christians." Apart from the descent of the Spirit into our own lives, we are dead branches disconnected from the living vine.

On Pentecost, the church was born. A Spirit-filled community was established. A body of believers was inextricably fixed to Christ the head. And this happened at both the individual and corporate levels. Paul tells us that God "saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life" (Titus 3:5–7). Through the mighty work of his Spirit, God has cleansed us from sin and given us new life. We are justified, considered holy in his sight. And because the Spirit lives in us, we belong to Christ—are made members of his body—and have become children of God (Rom. 8:9, 14–17).

God is the sole initiator of salvation, and he pours out his Spirit unconditionally and without our solicitation.

And this is totally God's doing. As Bible scholar Frederick Dale Bruner explains, "Rather than pointing to the fulfillment of any or several spiritual requirements—for instance, 'when the disciples had fully met the price of Pentecost'—Luke points to history and to the sovereign timing of God." God is the sole initiator of salvation, and he pours out his Spirit unconditionally and without our solicitation. God is the subject and we are the direct object. He breaks down the barrier that sin erected between us and him, and he fills us with his life-giving Spirit, making us his people.

Union with Others

But that's not all. The Spirit's descent also breached the barrier that separated us from one another. Acts tells us that "Jews from every nation under heaven" were gathered in Jerusalem. "Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs" (2:9–11)—all these people heard the gospel, through tongues of fire and Peter's preaching. It was a sort of reversal of Babel. And 3,000 of them became Christians.

These weren't Jews only. Luke says the visitors from Rome we both "Jews and converts to Judaism"—meaning some were Gentiles. As minor as the detail might seem, it sets the trajectory for the rest of Luke's book. Later in Acts, we see the gospel moving from Jerusalem to other nations, and eventually Paul's ministry to the Gentiles becomes Luke's sole focus.

As an "apostle to the Gentiles," Paul knew well the reconciling power of God's Spirit. He told the Ephesians that Christ "has made [Jews and Gentiles] one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility" (2:14). And this unity breaks into every type of human relationship. No matter what our skin color, nationality, economic status, gender, or theological tradition is—we all are one in Christ and we all drink of the same Spirit (Gal. 3:28; 1 Cor. 12:13).

Unfortunately, we don't always act like this is a reality. Spend 30 minutes reading Christian news sites or theology blogs, and you'll find the church can be a contentious bunch. News reports about a kerygmatic kerfuffle or the rift between two groups never seem to be in short supply. And then there's the continuous backbiting unleashed on comment sections. Authors are like water skiers, only the internet is like the Amazon River. You pull off a fun or sophisticated trick and make a wake with your words, and then piranhas start chomping at your feet. Day after day, Christian media show us how difficult it is for some of us to live in unity.

But Paul calls us to "make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace" (Eph. 4:3). One way of doing this might be recalling the Day of Pentecost, how "all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit" (Acts 2:4, my italics). Luke doesn't say "some of them were filled" or "all of them received a portion." No, the Spirit of God came in fullness to everyone. No one of us has a monopoly on the Spirit. We all have the Word of God written on our hearts (Jer. 31:33). This doesn't mean that everyone is always right or that teachers are obsolete. Rather, it means we should recognize we all have the endowment of the Spirit and should therefore treat one another with mutual love and respect.

Everyone who experienced the earth-shattering, barrier-breaking event at Pentecost devoted themselves to "fellowship, to the breaking of bread" (Acts 2:42). That is, they lived in communion with another and shared the Lord's Supper together—the sign of our unity in Christ. The Lord's Supper, therefore, is not just a commemoration of Christ's death and resurrection; it's a symbol of our unity, and it should challenge us to pursue unity all the more.

A Foretaste of the New Creation

The Spirit's descent at Pentecost was so mind-blowing that Peter used apocalyptic language to describe what he and the other disciples experienced:

I will show wonders in the heavens above
and signs on the earth below,
blood and fire and billows of smoke.
The sun will be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood
before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. (Acts 2:19–20)

Yet scholars recognize that Peter's language also anticipates the eschatological nature of Pentecost. Even though the Spirit's descent at Pentecost has broken down major barriers in our lives here and now, there are still barriers yet to be broken. Thus, Pentecost is also a promise of redemption in all its fullness. While we have new life in Christ now, we await the resurrection of our bodies. And in the new creation, we will have uninterrupted fellowship with the Trinity and with one another. There will be no barriers between us and God or us and each other.

Pentecost, therefore, is far more than a past event describing an audacious group of Christians. It's the reason for their audacity—the day when redemption became a reality, heaven met earth, and Jews and Gentiles became one—and the promise of what's yet to come.

Kevin P. Emmert is CT assistant online editor. You can follow him on Twitter @Kevin_P_Emmert.

Yesterday I saw a doctrine. I'm at the annual Hampton University Ministers' Conference in Virginia, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary. This year it gathers some 8,000 African American bishops, pastors, "first ladies," music directors, and assorted church leaders for mutual encouragement and inspiration. These brothers and sisters love to "do church," which means (among other things) getting heart, mind, soul, and body involved in worship.

Black preachers begin not merely assuming the illumination of the Spirit, but almost demanding it.

It also means they take seriously the doctrine of the illumination of Scripture. That doctrine reminds us that before we can grasp—with heart and mind—the meaning of any given passage of Scripture, the Holy Spirit has to illumine us. For introspective types like me, that means experiencing a lucid moment, quiet and inward, of insight or inspiration. Not so for my black friends.

They begin preaching not merely assuming the illumination of the Spirit, but almost demanding it. They read the text, massage the text, and, as one seminar leader put it, make love to the text. Their cadences roll like an ever living stream, from a trickle to a roaring waterfall. Black preachers assume that the full range of emotions need to be elicited if we're going to understand a text. By the time the preacher is through, the congregation is alive, hands are raised, bodies are dancing, voices are lifted in praise.

The expectation of illumination is so powerful in black worship, it can happen spontaneously. One preacher, James Forbes, asked someone from the audience to read the text he wanted to preach on. A woman stood, and as loudly as she could in the vast arena, read from Exodus 15, with Forbes repeating each phrase from his microphone. She wound her way to verse 26—"for I am the Lord that healeth thee." She barely finished the sentence when she shouted out in praise and began gyrating in joy in her place. She not only understood, she grasped with her whole being the promise of that verse. The illumination of the Holy Spirit.

There's another type of illumination that's important, too. The illumination of our ignorance.

I think the doctrine of the illumination of Scripture should be expanded to the illumination of doctrine. It happens when you leave home and visit another tradition in the magnificent quilt called Christianity, and you see a doctrine and realize, perhaps for the first time, it's more true than you had imagined.

But there's another type of illumination that's important, too. The illumination of our ignorance.

Not Getting It

Being one of the very few white people in a sea of 8,000 black faces, one would think I'd feel intimidated in such a crowd, that I'd finally understand what it's like to be the minority. That's one point of a white man going to such a conference, no?

Not quite. When I walk into this setting, I walk in as a white man of privilege. I come with a full backpack of inherited power and wealth and influence, and thus privilege is embedded deep within me. I can't possibly leave it at the front door. Even in that sea of black faces, I don't feel intimidated or particularly shy. That's partly because of the warm greetings I received everywhere I go. (I don't know if it's Southern or African American hospitality, but it sure is nice.) But hospitality or not, because of my social location and privilege, I don't think I'll ever be illumined when it comes to feeling like an oppressed minority.

Reading the recent Atlantic cover story, "The Case for Reparations," does wonders for helping someone like me grasp afresh the injustice and suffering America has inflicted on our black brothers and sisters. I can understand that reality, and as a human being who has endured some measure of suffering, even empathize at some level. But fundamentally, I'm a man with a completely different experience of life. I can't possibly understand what it's like to be a black man in America. And that's a good thing.

I don't get it. I'll never get it. Which is precisely why I continue to need—desperately need—to stay in fellowship with "the other."

The ecumenical work we're called to—to show forth the unity of the body of Christ (John 17; Eph. 4)—does not mean I should try to grasp the world from the perspective of "the other." It does not mean to walk a mile in another person's shoes. That, I believe, is impossible. Instead, I think it means grasping that I cannot grasp it. If I can grasp it, I no longer need the "other"; if I grasp it, I get it, and if I get it, I can move on with this new illumination firmly embedded within.

No, I don't get it. I'll never get it. Which is precisely why I continue to need—desperately need—to stay in fellowship with my black brothers and sisters. And everyone else who is an "other"—Catholics, Pentecostals, Holiness folks, Baptists, not to mention Hispanics, Asian Ameircans, and that most mysterious creation called women. And so forth. We need each other not so we can understand each other, but precisely because we don't. Not because we can become compatible, but precisely because we're not. I need the "other" precisely to remember that they are an "other" and as such, a distinct and unique grace of God, someone with whom I can have genuine fellowship with—not a melding, but a fellowship of persons, each with their own gifts that the other needs.

Again, we get back to the beautiful taspestry of the faith, which allows me to enjoy not just glorious moments when I grasp as never before something true about the faith, but quiet moments when I realize I will never understand some things, that much will remain forever a mystery to me. And both are a work of the illumination of the Spirit, no?

Mark Galli is editor of Christianity Today.

A friend recently told me about one of her resolutions. Not for the new year—we were well into March—but a certain habit had gotten under her skin. "I've decided that when someone says,'Thank you,' I'm going to say, 'You're welcome.' It's a moral issue."

A moral issue? Really?

Yet, the more I think about what she said, the more I think she's onto something. Driving in my car, I hear NPR hosts thank each guest, and most respond with some version of "my pleasure," or the subvert the thanks with "no, thank you." We rarely hear the straightforward "you're welcome," and when we do, it usually comes from men.

It may seem like splitting hairs to make these distinctions between mannerisms that often come instinctually. There are issues of far greater importance in terms of how we live and what we say. But this remains an important point: Saying "you're welcome" is both an act of responsibility and hospitality that we who love God ought to embrace. It can be seen, in some circ*mstances, as the forgiveness of a debt.

Our landlord always sets aside our newspaper when my husband and I are out of town. It's a small but kind gesture, and in our quid pro quo economy, he could ask something of us in return. But he does this small kindness with no aim for recourse. "Thank you so much," I said on returning from a recent trip to Lake Tahoe. "You're welcome," he replied. He could have said, "No problem," or, "It was nothing," or, "Of course," and I would have understood what he meant. But it wasn't nothing; he created value for me. And I am grateful.

This is what I mean when I say that saying "you're welcome" is an act of responsibility. When we add something of value to someone else's life—when we bless them (which, by the way, never needs to be hashtagged, but that's another post)—we bear some responsibility for our own actions. We have created good, and good is not created apart from the work of God. To say, "No problem," or, "It's nothing," is, in some way, to shirk our responsibility.

Interestingly, several versions of "you're welcome" in other languages—like de nada in Spanish and de rien in French—literally mean "it is nothing," or "of nothing." In my opinion, this is where language falters. (Even Emily Post agrees.) What we do for each other isn't nothing, it's the foundation of community.

I don't mean to suggest that every time we hold a door or pass the salt we need to put on a full display of Christian responsibility. There are times in which "no problem" is a perfectly acceptable response, because it really doesn't put us out too much to slide the salt across the table. But if we actually created or contributed something of value to another person, we should tell them they're welcome. Even if the tone strikes us as more formal than we'd normally like, we should try it anyhow. Sometimes these small disciplines can feel uncomfortable, but they're worth sticking with.

I wonder sometimes if women are less prone to saying "you're welcome"—even while people associate traits of welcoming and hospitality with women—because we think it makes us sound arrogant or somehow unfeminine.

A study published last year revealed that women were unlikely to take credit for their own accomplishments in mixed-gender groups. We fall pray to impostor syndrome (which Sharon Hodde Miller wrote about earlier this year), the fear that we aren't good enough and we must deflect any praise. So perhaps the exercise here isn't just saying "you're welcome," it's saying it around—or to—the men in our lives.

"You're welcome" is also a phrase of great hospitality. It responds to a relationship, which is always a balance of thanking and welcoming. Part of what we do, as Christians, is welcome each other. We are a welcoming people. We welcome the stranger in our midst (Deut. 10:19); welcome the least of these as if they were Jesus (Matt. 25); and we are to be welcomed ourselves (Acts 28).

When we say, "You're welcome," we are performing a small act of hospitality. Just as often as we welcome, we ought to thank. Saying "you're welcome" to someone you've helped can serve as a timely reminder that others have welcomed you.

There is a fluidity to thanking and welcoming that undergirds all relationships in which we sacrifice something of our own for the good of someone else. And that's a really, really good thing. A moral issue.

Today's interview is with Greg Forster, program director for Faith, Work, and Economics, part of the Kern Family Foundation. Greg is also an author, his latest book being Joy for the World: How Christianity Lost Its Cultural Influence and Can Begin Rebuilding It. Today, we talk with Greg about discipleship, vocation, and developing a theology of work.

1) A lot of people lament the demise of the church in the Western world, but you seem to view this as an opportunity for renewal. Why the optimism?

The darker the world gets, the more opportunity we have to shine like stars in the darkness (Philippians 2:15). Scripture teaches us to expect that when Christians are not only faithful, but find ways of actively manifesting their faith within the life of their culture—the culture within which we are embedded will not be able to ignore this.

American culture mostly ignores Christianity now, but that's because we have forgotten how to manifest our faith within cultural activity. There's a reformational movement going on below the surface in the American church today, and sometimes not very far below the surface. People are discovering how we live out our faith in workplaces and neighborhoods. So it's reasonable to expect that we won't be ignored much longer.

The response will sometimes be hatred, especially by those whose power and influence are challenged by our cultural activities. But others will be drawn toward the things we're doing in the culture, because the image of God is still present in everyone. We all thirst for dignity, meaning, and hope. God does not owe us success, and if it turns out that in the season of history ahead he's planning to glorify himself in America mainly through the persecution of the church, we couldn't complain. But we'd be fools to assume that we know this is what God has in store. The pessimists have given up on American culture because they see things moving in the wrong direction right now, and they just project that line straight out into the future forever. We need to go back to our history—both the history of Christianity in general and the history of American Christianity in particular. Amazing changes of fortune are not unusual, especially when God's people practice the Christian virtue of hope.

2) I found it interesting that you presented discipleship as more than simply involving newly converted believers in spiritual practices, but the holistic efforts of Christians in engaging their community. Can you explain this?

The gospel must transform, literally, everything in our lives, so that we do it all for God rather than for ourselves and our natural desires. Otherwise the gospel is not the gospel. "Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men …You are serving the Lord Christ" (Colossians 3:23-24). Religious works are wonderful things and we should all do them diligently and joyfully. I ought to do more of them than I do. But we must beware of using them to "check off God," as theologian Mike Wittmer puts it: I've gone to church and prayed and done my Bible study. Check! Now the rest of my time is for me and my natural desires. I've tithed ten percent. Check! Now the rest of my money is for me and my natural desires. Or as Mark Greene puts it: the stark choice, the choice we all confront in life, is not so much between religion and irreligion as it is between religion as "a leisure-time activity" and "whole-life discipleship" that follows Christ in all things.

The gospel must transform, literally, everything in our lives, so that we do it all for God rather than for ourselves and our natural desires.

If you want to know where Greene got the language of "whole life" discipleship, it's right there in the very first thesis of Martin Luther's 95 Theses: "When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said 'repent,' he was calling for the whole life of the believer to be one of repentance." This was literally the starting point of the Reformation! Even then, Luther was only rediscovering the ancient truth that the church had always held. We're rediscovering it once again today, and it's a very exciting time.

3) Seems much of Christianity's renewed influence centers, for you, on a recovering of a robust doctrine of vocation. Why?

Vocation carries Christianity into the culture, manifesting our faith within the structures and relationships that make up a civilization. The world is content to ignore you as long as you profess and follow Christ in your leisure time. But when one worker in the office starts doing her work for Christ, watch out! Her coworkers can disregard the little gold cross she wears on a chain around her neck. If she offers to talk about what she believes, they can say no. But if she does her work in a way that manifests her faith, they can't ignore that. It will be in their faces every day, and it will be palpably, tangibly different from everyone else's work—it will smell different.

When Christians show that they find dignity and hope in their lives by serving God through the simple everyday tasks of their workplaces and neighborhoods, they're taking a sledgehammer to the foundations of evil powers.

Some will love the new smell and to some it will be a stench, but no one can ignore a powerful smell. She'll smell different even if the only visible difference is her attitude about her work. Don't underestimate how powerful that can be! Everyone wants dignity and hope, and the powers of the world use those desires to manipulate people. When Christians show that they find dignity and hope in their lives by serving God through the simple everyday tasks of their workplaces and neighborhoods, they're taking a sledgehammer to the foundations of evil powers. In those cases, where Christians have the opportunity to do things that stand out even more visibly, so much the better.

4) Your last book was the Joy of Calvinism. This book is Joy for the World. Some critics of the neo-reformed movement might say those two joys are incompatible. How would you respond?

I'm delighted to have done a lot of wonderful collaboration with both neo-reformed people and paleo-reformed people, and I don't feel like I have to identify myself with either camp. You'll find endorsem*nts from people in both camps on my books. When I turn away from the people on both sides who seem to enjoy bickering for its own sake, and turn to the people on both sides who strike me as wise and disinterested seekers of truth, I find myself saying "amen" to approximately 90% of the theology I hear from both of them.

And on the more specific question of whether we can have both "joy of Calvinism" and "joy for the world," I don't think the best and wisest theologians would agree with that regardless of whether they were "neo" or "paleo." Notice the critical difference in pronouns between the two titles. It's not joy "of" the world but joy "for" the world. The believer's joy is fundamentally "of" God, and for those Christians who are Calvinists, joy is also, derivatively, "of" Calvinism, insofar as we think that Calvinism helps us know the love and holiness of God more deeply. But the light of that joy is not supposed to be hidden under a bushel; it's supposed to be put up on a lampstand for all to see. It's supposed to be taken out into the world and offered there. We are supposed to be in the world but not of the world. Well, if we're not of the world, why are we supposed to be in the world? Because we have something for the world.

5) What would your advice be to pastors and church leaders on helping to form leaders to go into the world?

I think there's a widespread interest in this, but too many pastors are stuck at the "interested" stage and haven't taken enough action. I've spoken to many leaders who are encouraging the church to move in this direction and I hear a lot along the lines of: "I have no trouble getting pastors interested in this, but they never seem to do anything about it." So getting a move on and doing something is what I would encourage. Start small, but do start. You can't steer the car while it's parked.

Having lunch with people in their workplaces is a transformative experience for many pastors.

I would say step one is to spend time listening to your congregants about their vocations in their homes, workplaces, and neighborhoods. Go visit them in those places and learn their context. Having lunch with people in their workplaces is a transformative experience for many pastors. Ask how the church can be a place that helps equip them for the challenges they face there.

Study the theology of work—it's a subject that's core to the Bible's narrative literally from beginning to end. Gather your elders and talk about these needs together. Connect with other pastors who are working to reform their churches from promoting "leisure-time Christianity" to "whole-life discipleship." They're not hard to find. Once you get rolling with this, you'll have no difficulty at all finding opportunities to address it in the life of the local church. If you're looking for specific ideas on how the local church body can embrace this, there's a ton of great resources out there.

Daniel Darling is vice-president of communications for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Activist Faith.

Books about war used to be about "battles and leaders" (the actual title of a series of retrospective essays on the Civil War published in 1887 and 1888). This was not only fashion but also pedagogy, supported by the War Department's belief that military history was a necessary part of the curriculum for U.S. Army officers. Indeed one of the first governmental measures to preserve historic places was the War Department's purchase of Civil War battlefields—at first to preserve the cemeteries and the dead that had been left behind by the departing combatants. Eventually, in 1896, Congress declared four battlefields to be "monuments," in part for the historical memories that they conveyed, but also to preserve them as training grounds for military maneuver and for the education of officers.

The staff ride, a battlefield study tour taken by officers learning their trade, focused on the tactics of the battle under examination, as well as on how the two armies had gotten to that battlefield. It became a prominent feature of upper-level military study, from 1906 to World War II, and then again from the late '60s to the present. The pedagogical requirements of military history led to an ever deepening concentration on just why Grant had ordered that attack at Cold Harbor, why Jackson had been so sluggish at Seven Days', and—the $64,000 question that Civil War buffs will never stop asking, ever—why Lee ordered Pickett's charge, and whether Longstreet made a real effort to follow that order. By asking these questions, Army officers put themselves in the shoes of previous leaders and prepared for their own future decisions. Campaigns and battles were at the heart of this history, and leaders of battles, generals, were the all-important subjects. Perhaps the greatest practitioner of this genre in American history was Douglas Southall Freeman in his seemingly unending stream of books on Robert E. Lee and the Confederate general officers (at least the ones in the East). Freeman's relentless Teutonic approach to research, combined with an almost Johnsonian capacity to pass epigrammatic judgment and fueled with the passion of an unreconstructed son of a Confederate soldier, made his studies the summit of that approach. Photographs from the era show Eisenhower, Churchill, Marshall, and other luminaries intently listening to Freeman, as if to an oracle—for to them, he was, and that was what they expected a military historian to be.

To the chagrin of many military historians, readers—and non-military historians—still see "battles and leaders" as the dominant mode of military history. If you doubt that, you have not lately browsed the history section in one of the surviving superstores. In the academic discipline of military history, though, this has not been the case for more than forty years. Since the 1960s, military historians have engaged in their own warfare, skirmishing, maneuvering, and sometimes in digging rather formidable systems of entrenchments.

The late John Keegan, with his 19XX book, The Face of Battle, ignited the conflict. Keegan displaced the general from the battlefield by explicating the experience of the regular soldier in combat. He was not interested in what Henry V did at Agincourt, but in the experience of the Welsh archer preparing to shoot; he did not repeat the same set of anecdotes about the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, but gave the view of a private in the ranks waiting for the advance of Napoleon's Guard. Keegan's aimed to understand battle as soldiers had experienced it, not as generals believed that they had, should have, or could have directed it.

Keegan's approach appealed both to academics and to buffs, to the professional and the armchair tactician. It arrived just as oral history had demonstrated its respectability to a wider academic audience and just as the movement to do history from the "bottom up" rather than the "top down" was gaining traction. Oral history allowed a historian study social history without having to understand statistics. But unlike "cliometrical" social history, the oral-history approach had wide popular appeal; both genealogy and historical reenacting became popular hobbies in the 1970s, ways of exploring and expressing historical connection. The confluence of professional and lay audiences, coupled with bottom-up trends in the academic discipline, made books describing the experience of privates, corporals, and sergeants just as popular as those grading a general's thinking. Social histories were books about Dad's army. They told the stories that he refused to tell.

Perhaps the preeminent popular expression of that trend was Stephen Ambrose's D-Day, his 1995 account of the Normandy invasion published to critical acclaim and massive sales. As early as the 1970s, Ambrose had felt the shift in the wind and adjusted accordingly. The book that made him was a biography of the eminent Civil War fussbudget General Henry Wager Halleck; not a sexy biographical subject even for the chroniclers of generals, but it opened the door for Ambrose to write a biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Some of the stories that Ambrose later told about his writing of Eisenhower's biography, such as the number and extent of interviews with Eisenhower that he did, turned out to be fabrications at worst, fantasies at best—Ambrose, as it emerged shortly before his death and since, had an uneasy relationship with facts. Still, as he drafted that biography and worked with the Eisenhower Papers project, Ambrose became convinced of the importance of the interview. Thus, when he founded the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, he began a massive oral history project: interviewing veterans who had participated in D-Day. Those interviews served as the foundation for not only Ambrose's D-Day, but for Craig L. Symonds' Neptune, and many other studies.

The other strand of the "new military history"—now far from new—is the "war and society" strand, far more important to academic and professional historians at present than any other approach. It focuses on the society from which an army or a war develops, not merely what happened in that war or how that army was organized. Consequently one can now attend a military history conference and hear a very interesting paper on gender relations in the Red Army during the Battle of Kursk, or a vigorous argument over the metaphors of warfare in ancient Athens. (Try doing that forty years ago.) And more likely than not, an eminent speaker introducing this or that panel will dismiss "drums and trumpets" —as if this same dismissal hadn't been issued for the last thirty years. Not only is the new military history no longer new, it is also complacent.

As a matter of fact, in 1975 Dennis Showalter published a sparkling essay in Military Affairs, "A Modest Plea for Drums and Trumpets." Showalter correctly pointed out that one could not understand an army completely apart from its goal of destroying people and property, or apart from the means by which it was trained, disciplined, and controlled. To do good "war and society" history, he prophesied, one would still have to understand the history of military operations.

As with the "new military history" it criticized, Showalter's plea is now an old argument, yet one that does not seem to fade. I can't help but look at Symonds' Neptune, published to mark the 70th anniversary of D-Day, and hope that it is evidence that, at last, we might be getting beyond this historiographical dispute and spend our time debating more interesting things, to the benefit of both the academic clerisy and the interested laity. Even if we aren't, it would be hard to find a brisker, more compelling account of the entire scope of the Normandy invasion of 1944.

Symonds is, looking over his list of titles, a "drums and trumpets" kind of scholar—or, given his focus on naval history, a "pipes and chanteys" historian. Neptune, at its heart, is an operational history of the Normandy invasions: their conception, the arguments over them, their planning, their execution, and their aftermath. Yet throughout the book there are numerous respectful nods to the "war and society" point of view. Symonds explains the British-American cultural clash, between both privates and admirals, as they prepared and planned for the unprecedented invasion. It's not given too much space, and he is drawing together many other studies of the "American occupation of England"—but it's there because he obviously thought it important. He also includes an afterword with paragraph-long sketches answering the question "What happened to them after that?" (In case you wondered, "them" refers to generals and politicians—does the reader of Neptune really need to be reminded of what happened to Roosevelt, Churchill, and Eisenhower?) But Symonds also draws on numerous interviews with ordinary men and women from every stage of the operation, and he concludes with an anecdote from a seaman retelling his recurring nightmares after the war's end.

These tidbits can't of course compare to Ambrose's monumental compilation of oral histories in D-Day. But there is a limit to what oral history can do. Oral histories of men trapped beneath the bluffs of Omaha Beach are one thing; an oral history of a typewriter clerk in the logistical preparation for D-Day is … well, suffice it to say that it will not be written. The strength of Symonds' book is his insistence on focusing on things that certain professional and lay historians find tedious: planning, supply chains, logistical preparation, and scheduling. Amazingly, he makes all of this seem not only interesting, but as important as it actually was—even as the reader knows, with the dreadful certainty of hindsight, that so much of that planning will prove mistaken at best.

For Symonds, as it was for Ambrose, the entire Normandy invasion was ultimately a question of decisions. But Ambrose focused on the actual invasion itself, and then imposed a kind of democratic populism on the evidence: in his telling, only the Allied soldiers were flexible decision-making agents, and thus able to defeat the robotic Hun. Symonds' does not make that sort of Manichaean judgment; he's far too careful a historian to use cheap historiographical lenses that merely flatter the reader. Nor is he interested simply in what happened on D-Day itself. Instead he details a vast web of decisions, a sprawling Venn diagram draped across days, weeks, months, and years, preceding and succeeding the actual day of the invasion.

If history is contingent, then it is in part the work of historians to illuminate the decisions that humans make as contingent beings operating within structures and forces that are at times flexible, at times inflexible. Symonds does this. He chronicles the decisions of captains and lieutenants in the lower levels of the planning process. He recounts the decisions of men like Rear-Admiral Moon, who decided to work fifteen hours a day, seven days a week until, frayed by exhaustion, he decided to kill himself, and did, after meticulously wrapping a towel around his service pistol. Included are the decisions of coxswains to take their landing craft in to the designated landing zone where they were blown apart, and the decision of another coxswain to make an approach to some other part of the beach, where his cargo of soldiers lived. Destroyer captains, seeing men slaughtered on Omaha Beach by machine gun positions, decide to take their beloved ships so close to the beach that there could only have been was only a foot of water beneath their keels, and from there blasted apart the German defenses at virtually point blank range. Soldiers decide that they would rather die fighting than crouched in the surf, or at the base of the bluffs on Omaha Beach. And Eisenhower, lighting cigarette from cigarette, decides to postpone the invasion by a day; decides not to cancel the Utah Beach landing; decides to give the go-ahead to the Airborne landings; and finally decides to give the order for the invasion.

Ultimately Symonds strives to rise above the historiographical strife of the past forty years. In doing so, he has not produced battles-and-leaders history; or operational history; or war-and-society history. Symonds has written—to quote for our purposes a great review by the late Edmund Morgan—"social history, institutional history, political history, [military] history, and not any single one of them, which is to say good history." I hope everyone at both the Barnes & Noble coffee shop with the stack of Gettysburg battle studies and the alt-funk java joint down the street takes notice.

Albert Louis Zambone's previous piece for B&C was a review of The End of Sparta by Victor Davis Hanson.

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Updated 6/6/13 8:58 a.m. with further identification

Seattle police have arrested a suspect in today's shooting at Otto Miller Hall on the campus of Seattle Pacific University. Local media report that Seattle police identified him as Aaron Ybarra, a 26-year-old with no known connections to SPU and that he was not a student at the school. He was armed with a shotgun and a knife, police said.

Police say the Ybarra was subdued by a student, who was acting as a building monitor. That student is now widely identified as Jon Meis. The Seattle Times says he was "working at the time as a monitor who sits at a desk in the lobby, near the Hall's front door. [He] quickly moved in to pepper-spray the gunman, then he tackled him to the ground. Police arriving moments later moved in to handcuff and arrest the suspect, other witnesses said."

Seattle police told reporters that after the student building monitor subdued the shooter, other students jumped on top of them and helped to keep the shooter to the ground.

"There are a number of heroes in this," assistant police chief Paul McDonagh told reporters Thursday night. "One person made the initial contact, then another person helped, and then other people joined in. If we're going to find any light in this, it's that the people around stepped up."

"I want to remind everyone here that the actions of the subject here do not define SPU or the city of Seattle," McDonagh said. "The actions of the students and staff, that's what defines Seattle Pacific University. This is not about an evil act but about the people that actually lived through his scenario and assisted each other when things were pretty tragic."

One victim, a man so far only identified as 19, died after arriving at the hospital. A woman is hospitalized with serious injuries, reportedly a shot to the chest.

"She was in shock and thought she was going to die," student Chris Howard told KOMO. "We had to reassure her several times, no she's going to get through this."

Two other men were also injured, but their injuries were not life threatening.

Classes and all activities were canceled Friday.

"We're a community that relies on Jesus Christ for strength and we'll need that at this time." said university president Dan Martin. "My message is one of hope—in our Lord Savior Jesus Christ who can get us through this."

This is the latest in a string of Christian college attacks in the last two years. In April 2012, a former student of Oikos University, a small Korean-American college in Oakland, killed seven and wounded three. In November 2013, an armed security guard at Liberty University shot a freshman who reportedly attacked him with a hammer. (State officials said the armed security guard acted in self-defense and did not file criminal charges.)

In February, a Union University commuter student allegedly shot his fiancée, another Union commuter student, to death and left her body on campus property.

Last month, actor Michael Jace was charged with murdering his wife, a financial aid counselor at Biola University, though that shooting reportedly occurred at their home.