No! Cannes does not matter. Thank Goodness

I found this absolutely hilarious.

clipped from www.time.com The other, sadder truth is that the foreign films shown here, and at big festivals like Berlin, Venice, Toronto and New York, have never had less an impact on the average U.S. moviegoer than they do now. Long gone is the time when every American with a pretense to culture felt obliged to know all about ten or twenty top European or Asian directors. (Long gone is the time when Americans felt required to have a pretense to culture, let alone the real thing.) The winners of Cannes' top prize, the Palme d'Or, used to be guaranteed a healthy run in American art houses. But the franchise auteurs whose films are in this year's main competition — Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne from Belgium, Nuri Bilge Ceylan for Turkey, Jia Zhangke from China — have made hardly a dent in the States, on either moviegoers or young moviemakers. They are leaders without followers.

Truth in the real world

clipped from christiantheology.wordpress.com How we apprehend and measure truth in the real world is not reducible to the world that people end up with when they choose to narrow the scope so as to exclude the real world. But when they go home at night they live in the real world with the rest of us. The world where good and evil exist and people matter more than all of the accumulated content of the sciences combined. More than the stars themselves, and we would give up any one of them in all their glory for the peace and safety of even one of our small children. Because in the end, if we are true to ourselves, we can only live consistently in a Theistic universe. It’s the one we we’re made for, and the kind of thing we are doesn’t make sense in any other. The one where persons are more important by far than anything else, and are not reducible to chance and time and matter in the void, but carry within themselves a transcendent importance that speaks of something else.

Wonderful Article by Christopher Neiswonger called Atheism is unthinkable.