Denison Forum
Dr. Jim Denison
Oppenheimer won last night’s Academy Awards for best picture, best director (Christopher Nolan), best actor (Cillian Murphy), and best supporting actor (Robert Downey Jr.), as well as for film editing, score, and cinematography. As you know, the movie tells the story of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s quest to build the world’s first nuclear weapons.
One reviewer explained its appeal, calling the film “very much a movie of the moment—a feel-bad hit for our feel-bad age, perfectly calibrated to capture the imagination of an audience perpetually scanning the horizon for the bloom of some new mushroom cloud.”
We don’t have to look far to find such “clouds” in the news:
- Today marks the fourth anniversary of the WHO’s declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic; the global death count from the virus now exceeds seven million.
- The largest wildfire in Texas history was apparently ignited by a power company’s facilities; the conflagration has left at least two people dead, killed thousands of animals, and scorched more than a million acres of land. (For a theological reflection on this ongoing tragedy, please see my new website paper, “The Texas wildfires: What we know, what we don’t know (yet), and what to do with what we know.”
- The proliferation of AI, cloud computing, crypto-mining, and electric vehicles is making unprecedented demands on America’s aging and increasingly inadequate power grid.
- An epidemic of anxiety, loneliness, and technology-induced isolation continues unabated.
But I think an even deeper force is at work in our culture, one to which the gospel can uniquely respond with the hope we long to embrace today.
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