Rendering Unto Caesar
Excused Absence, by Douglas Wilson
Reviewed by Rick Saenz

If you must speak nicely to your audience, it can put a damper on your freedom to exhort them. Preach against worldliness—and offend a congregation that exhibits no significant statistical difference from the world. Teach on the sanctity of marriage—and afflict your divorced listeners. Examine the abdication of parental responsibility that lies at the root of sending children to government schools—-and outrage parents whose lives critically depend on five days a week of government-provided child care.

If common sense ruled, one would have expected Christians to have deserted the government school system long ago; not because of any biblical admonitions against sacrificing children on the altar of the state, but as a purely practical matter—leaving behind schools that are devoted to destroying faith, cultivating ignorance, and encouraging amorality. And yet we find that the majority of Christian children are even now sent to these schools, by parents who are quick to provide a long laundry list of excuses and justifications for doing it.

I can only guess that Doug Wilson went and hid in a broom closet when they began passing out the smiley-face buttons; in any case, he has crafted a well-deserved reputation for not speaking very nicely to his audience. For that we should all be thankful, since it makes him the man for us in our hour of need. His latest contribution to the fray is Excused Absence, a concise and powerful polemic, subtitled Should Christian kids leave public schools? I don't think I'll be spoiling a mystery for you by telling you that the answer is a resounding, stirring, heartening YES!

Wilson really only has one story to tell, a story about how to live and grow as a covenant family. But it is a rich and complex story, one that is best approached from many different angles, one per book. This latest book tackles the question of how to train up a child by beginning with a bit of overview and a bit of history, but fifteen pages haven't gone by before we find out that the root of yet one more problem is that same old sin-fathers who abdicate their responsibility as the covenantal head of the family. As soon as he's smacked us between the eyes once more with that favorite two-by-four, Wilson moves on quickly to sketch out the goals of a truly biblical education and to show how government schools are totally antithetical to those goals-and we fathers are now ready to absorb the message, having been properly tenderized.

Excused Absence is excellent in many ways. The teaching is solid, as you would expect, and solidly founded on the idea of covenant family. The chapters are brief and there aren't very many of them, making it easy to remember what you read and to find remembered passages for further study. One very helpful chapter answers the most common excuses for staying in government schools, another points out pitfalls to avoid when making one's exit from them, and a third gives practical advice on how to make the transition.

You'll probably laugh as I did when you find that Marvin Olasky, in his otherwise gracious and enthusiastic introduction, was compelled to take exception to some of Wilson's points. Well, hey, it's a Doug Wilson book, and it wouldn't be one if a reader's own ox weren't gored every few pages. Once you learn to be exhilarated rather than offended by that, you'll treasure this and the rest of his books as much as I do.

And Another and Another and Another…
Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones
Reviewed by Laurence Windham

I am still evaluating why I like action movies. Not all action type movies, mind you, but basically the cleaner, "good versus bad" type. Angela and I recently viewed the second Star Wars movie, Attack of the Clones. (Which, in case you haven't been keeping score, is actually the fifth Star Wars movie released. Go figure.) Maybe George Lucas has gotten old on us. Maybe the first trilogy, episodes IV, V, and VI were so special effects driven we didn't notice at that time the story line was weak...still, the first three had Harrison Ford as the intrepid Hans Solo. But I digress.

This movie, just as the first episode, which was the last one previously released, is for die-hard fans only. For those who did not grow up seeing the first trilogy, I can't imagine them liking this second trilogy as much we liked the first, being post Matrix and Fellowship of the Ring. The movie Matrix was the thinking man's movie, despite the fact that the directors included standard over-the-top action sequences to sate the masses. And then came Fellowship of the Ring. One of the hallmarks of this greatest of films was the absence of the anti-hero. The bad guys were really bad. We are talking the worst. The good guys were good guys struggling with doing what was right, all the while dealing with their own personal depravity. They fought as much with the evil in themselves as they did against the evil in Middle Earth.

Between these two movies, Star Wars, the series, is all fluff, eye candy that entertains while asking nothing of you. The enemies in the Matrix and Fellowship of the Ring seem so much more real. They are personifications that we find in our own lives. The heroes' dilemmas mirror our own. Hence, the viewer is stirred by the conflict more than simply mesmerized by the cinematography. In Attack of the Clones, the battles are huge, the Jedi are outnumbered. The future of the Federation looks bleak.. .and I really could not care less. That could be because I know the outcome. I saw the Seth Lord vaporized in the 6th episode, uh, the 3rd one released. The last two episodes are like watching the biography channel about the heroes and villains of World War Two. What was Lucas thinking? Does anyone know when the next Lord of the Rings or Matrix is coming out?