Your best life: Life in Christian cinema is often a game of Friday night high school football

 

The problem with sports being a metaphor for life is not that the claim is inaccurate: sports truly is a metaphor for life. The problem is the terrain of what constitutes a metaphor for life is a vast landscape. Within sports, virtually everything can and is described as being a metaphor for life.

When it comes to comparing values and ideals taken from sports and applied cinematically to life, I have a fondness for golf and high school and college football movies. While I don’t play golf (at least not yet) I did play a bit of high school football some many decades ago.

There’s strong evidence that sport strongly reinforces certain personal characteristics such as responsibility, courage, teamwork, mental focus, persistence, humility, commitment and self-discipline.

While there are all kinds of things that can rightly divide secular moviemaking from films made by Christian genre movie producers, high school football is the game field they both play, often scoring box office touchdowns on. Perhaps in no small part because Friday night high school football is in some ways best thought of as a secular religion south of the Mason Dixon Line. High school football teams usually play between eight and 10 games in a season, starting after Labor Day. If teams have successful league seasons, they advance to regional or state playoff tournaments. Some schools in Texas play as many as 15 games if they advance to the state championship game. Most high school teams play in a regional league, although some travel 50 to 100 miles to play opponents.

Among my favourite golf movies are Tin Cup from 1996, starring Kevin Costner and Rene Russo; The Legend of Bagger Vance, with Will Smith, Matt Damon and Charlize Theron, released in 2000; and Seven Days in Utopia, released in 2011, starring Robert Duvall and Lucas Black, based on the book Golf’s Sacred Journey: Seven Days at the Links of Utopia by Dr. David Lamar Cook, a psychologist who lives in the Hill Country of Texas, where the book and movie are set.

As for American high school football movies, Ranker, the social consumer web platform launched in August 2009, designed around collaborative linked datasets, individual list-making and voting, which attracts 20 million unique visitors per month, in fact, has a category simply called “The Best High School Football Movies.”

Ranked number one is Friday Night Lights the 2004 film directed by Peter Berg, which documents the coach and players of the 1988 season Permian High School Panthers football team in Odessa, Texas and their run for the state championship, based on the 1990 book, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H. G. Bissinger. The film won the Best Sports Movie ESPY Award.

Number two on Ranker’s list is Remember the Titans, made in 2000, and based on the true story of African-American coach Herman Boone, portrayed by Denzel Washington as he tries to introduce a racially diverse team at recently but voluntarily integrated T. C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia in 1971. It was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.

In 2006, Alex and Stephen Kendrick, who are both associate pastors on the staff of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, made Facing the Giants, their second Sherwood Pictures movie, about high school football and resilient faith. While the movie is admired and often still shown 11 years after it was made at Christian church movie nights, secular cinema critics have been less effusive in their praise.  Still, two scenes stand out for me, and are widely available on YouTube. The first is lineman and Shiloh Eagles team captain Brock Kelley’s 100-plus yard blindfolded “Death Crawl” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sUKoKQlEC4) with his 160-pound teammate Jeremy Johnson on his back, and soccer kicker turned placekicker David Childers’ 51-yard game-winning field goal in the Eagle’s 24-23 victory over the Richmond Giants (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uCj5_a3nbw).

When the Game Stands Tall was released in 2014. It stars Jim Caviezel, best known for portraying Jesus in Mel Gibson’s blockbuster 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, here playing Catholic De La Salle High School Spartans’ football coach Bob Ladouceur (with Laura Dern as his wife, Bev Ladouceur), and telling the story of what comes after the record-setting 151-game 1992–2003 winning streak by De La Salle, a Catholic boys’ high school in Concord, California, just east of San Francisco. The movie is an adaptation of the 2003 book of the same name by Neil Hayes, then a columnist with the Contra Costa Times.  The movie was filmed in Louisiana.

Released a year later in 2015 is Woodlawn is also a true story and in some ways a faith-based version of Remember the Titans, although Woodlawn is set slightly later (two years) and is situated in at Woodlawn High School in Birmingham, Alabama in 1973, a decade after Birmingham had Bull Connor as commissioner of public safety in 1961 when the civil rights “Freedom Riders” bused to the South, and where on Sept. 15, 1963 a bomb exploded before Sunday morning services at the 16th Street Baptist Church, with a predominantly black congregation that served as a meeting place for civil rights leaders. Four young girls were killed and many other people injured.

Woodlawn opens with a prologue set three years earlier on Sept. 12, 1970 where legendary University of Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, the Crimson Tide’s iconic fedora-wearing legend, well played by Jon Voight, tries to ease tensions by inviting John McKay and his University of Southern California (USC) Trojans team to play at Legion Field in Birmingham, marking the first time a fully integrated team had come to play Alabama in the South. The Crimson Tide had one black player at the time. The game was a 42-21 Trojans rout.

Cut to three years later, when Woodlawn High School becomes integrated, with football coach Tandy Gerelds, played by Nic Bishop, welcoming the arrival of such talented black players as Tony Nathan, played by Caleb Castille.

Hank Erwin, played by Sean Astin, just sort of shows up at Woodlawn High School, introducing himself as a “sports chaplain” and asking to address the team. Tandy Gerelds reluctantly agrees. In his impassioned speech Hank asks the players to “choose Jesus” and, much to the coach’s amazement, most of the players agree, including Tony Nathan, who would go onto become a tailback for Alabama and later the Miami Dolphins. Erwin’s sons, Birmingham brothers Jon and Andrew Erwin, directed Woodlawn.

To understand the somewhat enigmatic self-proclaimed sports chaplain Hank Erwin, it is helpful to know something of the “Jesus movement,” which began on the west coast of the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, spreading primarily throughout North America, Europe, and Central America. Members of the movement were often called “Jesus people,” or “Jesus freaks.”

Its predecessor, the charismatic movement, had already been in full swing for about a decade. It involved mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics who testified to supernatural experiences similar to those recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, especially speaking in tongues. Both these movements were calling the church back to what they called early Christianity and recovery of the gifts of the Spirit.

TIME magazine had a 1966 cover asking “Is God Dead?” They had another cover story in 1971 on “The Jesus Revolution.” And just one year later, in June 1972, more than 80,000 high school and college students gathered in the Cotton Bowl Stadium in Dallas for Explo ’72, organized by Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as Cru) to celebrate the person of Christ and mobilize youth to take the Good News to friends and family when they returned to their hometowns. Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, led the initiative and Billy Graham, now 98, and the most important Christian crusade and revival evangelist of the latter half of the 2oth century, preached at it. And Hank Erwin was there for it.

The dramatic tension on and off the field is elevated by events such as Nathan refusing to shake Alabama governor George Wallace’s hand during an awards dinner, citing Wallace’s opposition to school integration, and Tandy getting in trouble with the local school board because of the team’s religious activities, including Hank Erwin getting the microphone plug pulled while delivering the Lord’s Prayer before the history-making 1973 game that attracted 42,000 spectators (another 20,000 were turned away), only to have the thousands of spectators spontaneously recite it for him.

Peter J. Leithart, a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church in America, who lives in Birmingham, Alabama, and is president of the Theopolis Institute, wrote in a review in September 2015, after an advance screening of the film in Birmingham, in the Catholic journal First Things that “the acting is good, especially Jon Voight as Bear Bryant, Nic Bishop as Woodlawn’s coach, Tandy Gerelds, and Caleb Castille who plays Nathan in his first film. Technically, evangelical films have come a long way.”

Caleb Castille was originally hired as a stunt double for the British actor who was picked to play Tony Nathan, but visa complications left the Erwins scrambling to find a last-minute replacement. Only then did they discover Caleb’s audition tape.

Caleb Castille won two national championship rings with the University of Alabama before he sensed God was calling him out of football to pursue an acting career instead. His father, Jeremiah Castille, played with Tony Nathan on the 1979 Alabama Crimson Tide national championship team.

Still, Leithart was left dissatisfied by Woodlawn. “I think there are a number of reasons for that dissatisfaction, but at base the problem is theological (ain’t it always).

“Evangelicalism is a word religion. I’m a big fan of words, but even talking pictures aren’t fundamentally about words. It’s no accident that the hall of fame for directors has a large share of Catholics (Fellini, Hitchcock, Scorsese), Orthodox (Tarkovsky, Eisenstein), and sacramental Protestants (Bergman, Malick). This can’t be the whole story, of course, since aniconic Judaism has produced some of the world’s great filmmakers. But there’s something to it: Evangelical films over-explain, over-talk. They don’t trust the images to do the work.

“I suspect a more sacramentally oriented evangelicalism, an evangelicalism more attuned to types and symbols in scripture, would make better films.

“Evangelicalism is also a conversionist faith. The key crisis of life is the moment of commitment to Christ. In Woodlawn, most of the characters convert early in the film, necessarily so because the story is about the effect of the revival on race relations. But that means that the line of character development is flat. The really crucial character development has taken place in the moment of conversion. The main exception is Coach Gerelds, and not surprisingly, it’s Coach Gerelds who ends up being the dramatic focus of the film, the character whose emotions and motivations we get to know best.

“Theologically speaking, character development is ‘sanctification.’ A conversionist form of Christianity places less emphasis on sanctification than on conversion and justification. In films, that translates into drastic oversimplification of human psychology. For evangelicals, there are only two sets of motivations, as there are two kinds of people: Saved and unsaved. While that is ultimately true, it is not the whole story.”

Woodlawn, distributed by Pure Flix Entertainment, owned by David. A.R. White, raised in a small Mennonite farming town outside of Dodge City, Kansas, brothers Kevin and Bobby Downes, and Michael Scott, did impressively better perhaps with the very secular Rotten Tomatoes, which is by no means always kind to either evangelical or high school football films, and is the leading online aggregator of movie reviews from a mix of professional critics and its community of users, with an overall score of 77 per cent, and an audience score of 82 per cent (earning a “full popcorn bucket”) meaning the movie received 3.5 stars or higher by Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes users. Rotten Tomatoes noted under “Critics consensus: No consensus yet.” Rotten Tomatoes is part of Fandango’s portfolio of digital properties.

Next up for me perhaps is the college football movie from 2006, We are Marshall, which depicts the aftermath of the Nov. 14, 1970 airplane crash that killed 37 football players on the Huntington, West Virginia Marshall University Thundering Herd, along with five coaches, two athletic trainers, the athletic director, 25 boosters, and a crew of five. New coach Jack Lengye, played by Matthew McConaughey, arrives on the scene four months later in March 1971, determined to rebuild Marshall’s Thundering Herd and heal a grieving community in the process (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YU4QBR-V79I).

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

 

From Antipope Hippolytus to Saint Hippolytus: Today marks the memorial of the first antipope and the only antipope to eventually become a canonized saint

For years now, Jeanette as had a really cool mobile app (cool that is to an eccentric at times and eclectic at all times Catholic history nerd like me) for her Apple iPhone called Saint of the Day, which is a product of Franciscan Media in Cincinnati, Ohio, which was started by the Franciscan Friars in 1893 with St. Anthony Messenger magazine.

Back around about 2010 or 2011 probably when I convinced Jeanette, an Anglican, to purchase the app for $2.99, or something like that at the time, I assured her it would be a worthwhile investment. This was at a time when free apps were starting to flood the market (the first generation iPhones had been introduced by Apple in the American market only several years earlier on June 29, 2007, and Jeanette purchased an iPhone 4 in June 2010, the same month they were released.)

Jeanette noted it was easy for me, the Catholic, to say, as it wasn’t my $2.99 being shelled out, as I didn’t even have a smartphone. At the risk of digressing – I do now, namely Jeanette’s old iPhone4, which would have been her new one back then – but it is not connected to my MTS telephone or Shaw Internet network providers now, so I can’t use it to listen to Saint of the Day, but I do use the old smartphone some, mainly for its camera and calculator applications, less frequently as a voice recorder, and rarely as a Big Ben alarm chime wake-up.

In any event, digression aside, I think history as proved that at least on this occasion, I spent someone else’s money well, and the Saint of the Day app, upgraded at least once over the last six years, if not more often, and has proven itself to be a sound $2.99 investment.

The Saint of the Day for Aug. 13 is Saint Hippolytus, the only person to make the journey from being an antipope to canonized saint.

Antipopes are pretenders to the Chair of Peter, who set themselves up in opposition to the legitimately canonically elected pontiff, frequently exercising pontifical functions in defiance of the legitimate occupant heading the Holy See. Sound pretty straight forward? No so much. Take Pope Gregory XII, who resigned at the request of the Council of Constance on July 4, 1415 to help end the Great Western Schism, and until Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI announced his resignation Feb. 11, 2013, had been the last pope to resign some 600 years ago. The schism had actually begun some 37 years earlier in 1378, and over the course of the next three and more decades, saw two papal claimants, and later three, vying for supremacy over the medieval church in a papal dance that stretched from Avignon in France to Rome in Italy, and eventually saw the not only Pope Gregory XII resign, but also two papal impostors, the contenders,  Antipope Benedict XIII and Antipope John XXIII (not to be confused, of course, with St. John XXIII, who was pope from 1958 to 1963), paving the way for Pope Martin V in 1417, the first pope in almost 40 years to be able to command the allegiance of the whole Latin Church.

Cardinal Joseph Hergenröther, the first cardinal-prefect of the Vatican Archives, has enumerated a total of 30 antipopes between Antipope Hippolytus in 217 and Antipope Felix V, whose regnal name was Amadeus of Savoy, and was the last of the papal schismatics, whose pretension to the Chair of Peter ended in 1449. Hippolytus was a brilliant theologian and is considered a Church Father. He wrote treatises against several of the heresies afflicting the Church in the late second and early third centuries – most of them Trinitarian or Christological – “as early Christians sometimes struggled to discern the correct terminology to apply to the apostolic teaching that Jesus was true God and true man,” notes Steve Weidenkopf, a lecturer of church history at the Notre Dame Graduate School of Christendom College in Alexandria, Virginia, in the bog Catholic Answers (http://www.catholic.com/blog/steve-weidenkopf/the-antipope-who-became-a-saint).

In particular, Hippolytus was frustrated by Pope Zephyrinus’ slowness to “make a quick and authoritative decision concerning the heresy known as Modalism,” Weidenkopf writes. Modalism, known also as Monarchianism and Sabellianism, blurred the distinctions between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, positing that these were just different modes of one divine person. To a Modalist, God the Father appeared on earth in the mode of Jesus Christ, God the Son. When Pope Callistus I succeeded Pope Zephyrinus in 217 and showed no more inclination than his predecessor in dispatching the Modalism heresy, Hippolytus was so angered he claimed Callistus was unworthy of the office due to his checkered past, when as a young slave, some believed, he had embezzled his master’s money, Hippolytus gathered a group of followers who elected him pope. In so doing Hippolytus, opened the door to the concept of the antipope, which reached its height during the Great Western Schism of 14th century. As for Modalism, it would eventually be declared a heresy by Pope St. Dionysius circa 262.

Hippolytus’ schism lasted for 19 years, Weidenkopf says, “and through three pontificates. “As a rigorist who did not believe that serious sinners should be re-admitted to communion in the Church,” Hippolytus also refused to accept the more-merciful approach of Pope Callistus I and his successors.

However, when Maximinus Thrax, also known as Maximinus I, became Roman Emperor in 235, he resumed persecution of Christians, particularly clergy, and both Antipope Hippolytus, and Pope Pontian, who had also been elected in 230, were arrested and sent to the mines on the island of Sardinia.

Amidst the suffering and hardship of the mines, Hippolytus renounced his schism and papal claim and was reconciled to the Church by Pontian.

Both men later succumbed to the harsh conditions, and their remains were transported for burial in Rome, where they were recognized as martyrs and saints of the Church.

And if you happened to guess today is also the memorial of Saint Pontian, you guessed right.

So the Roman Catholic Church’s Saint of the Day for Aug. 13 is actually saints plural: Saints Pontian and Hippolytus.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

 

Woodlawn is a potent mix of Deep South high school football set against a backdrop of racial tension and the early 1970s Jesus movement

While there are all kinds of things that can rightly divide secular moviemaking from films made by Christian genre movie producers, high school football is the game field they both play, often scoring box office touchdowns on. Perhaps in no small part because Friday night high school football is in some ways best thought of as a secular religion south of the Mason Dixon Line. High school football teams usually play between eight and 10 games in a season, starting after Labor Day. If teams have successful league seasons, they advance to regional or state playoff tournaments. Some schools in Texas play as many as 15 games if they advance to the state championship game. Most high school teams play in a regional league, although some travel 50 to 100 miles to play opponents.

Ranker, the social consumer web platform launched in August 2009, designed around collaborative linked datasets, individual list-making and voting, which attracts 20 million unique visitors per month, in fact, has a category simply called “The Best High School Football Movies.”

It’s a pretty impressive list.

Ranked number one is Friday Night Lights the 2004 film directed by Peter Berg, which documents the coach and players of the 1988 season Permian High School Panthers football team in Odessa, Texas and their run for the state championship, based on the 1990 book, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H. G. Bissinger. The film won the Best Sports Movie ESPY Award.

Number two on Ranker’s list is Remember the Titans, made in 2000, and based on the true story of African-American coach Herman Boone, portrayed by Denzel Washington as he tries to introduce a racially diverse team at recently but voluntarily integrated T. C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia in 1971. It was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.

Woodlawn, released last October, is also a true story and in some ways a faith-based version of Remember the Titans, although Woodlawn is set slightly later (two years) and is situated in at Woodlawn High School in Birmingham, Alabama in 1973, a decade after Birmingham had Bull Connor as commissioner of public safety in 1961 when the civil rights “Freedom Riders” bused to the South, and where on Sept. 15, 1963 a bomb exploded before Sunday morning services at the 16th Street Baptist Church, with a predominantly black congregation that served as a meeting place for civil rights leaders. Four young girls were killed and many other people injured.

Woodlawn opens with a prologue set three years earlier on Sept. 12, 1970 where legendary University of Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, the Crimson Tide’s iconic fedora-wearing legend, well played by Jon Voight, tries to ease tensions by inviting John McKay and his University of Southern California (USC) Trojans team to play at Legion Field in Birmingham, marking the first time a fully integrated team had come to play Alabama in the South. The Crimson Tide had one black player at the time. The game was a 42-21 Trojans rout.

Cut to three years later, when Woodlawn High School becomes integrated, with football coach Tandy Gerelds, played by Nic Bishop, welcoming the arrival of such talented black players as Tony Nathan, played by Caleb Castille.

Hank Erwin, played by Sean Astin, just sort of shows up at Woodlawn High School, introducing himself as a “sports chaplain” and asking to address the team. Tandy Gerelds reluctantly agrees. In his impassioned speech Hank asks the players to “choose Jesus” and, much to the coach’s amazement, most of the players agree, including Tony Nathan, who would go onto become a tailback for Alabama and later the Miami Dolphins. Erwin’s sons, Birmingham brothers Jon and Andrew Erwin, directed Woodlawn.

To understand the somewhat enigmatic self-proclaimed sports chaplain Hank Erwin, it is helpful to know something of the “Jesus movement,” which began on the west coast of the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, spreading primarily throughout North America, Europe, and Central America. Members of the movement were often called “Jesus people,” or “Jesus freaks.”

Its predecessor, the charismatic movement, had already been in full swing for about a decade. It involved mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics who testified to supernatural experiences similar to those recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, especially speaking in tongues. Both these movements were calling the church back to what they called early Christianity and recovery of the gifts of the Spirit.

TIME magazine had a 1966 cover asking “Is God Dead?” They had another cover story in 1971 on “The Jesus Revolution.” And just one year later, in June 1972, more than 80,000 high school and college students gathered in the Cotton Bowl Stadium in Dallas for Explo ’72, organized by Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as Cru) to celebrate the person of Christ and mobilize youth to take the Good News to friends and family when they returned to their hometowns. Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, led the initiative and Billy Graham, now 97, and the most important Christian crusade and revival evangelist of the latter half of the 2oth century, preached at it. And Hank Erwin was there for it.

The dramatic tension on and off the field is elevated by events such as Nathan refusing to shake Alabama governor George Wallace’s hand during an awards dinner, citing Wallace’s opposition to school integration, and Tandy getting in trouble with the local school board because of the team’s religious activities, including Hank Erwin getting the microphone plug pulled while delivering the Lord’s Prayer before the history-making 1973 game that attracted 42,000 spectators (another 20,000 were turned away), only to have the thousands of spectators spontaneously recite it for him.

Peter J. Leithart, a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church in America, who lives in Birmingham, Alabama, and is president of the Theopolis Institute, wrote in a review last September after an advance screening of the film in Birmingham in the Catholic journal First Things that “the acting is good, especially Jon Voight as Bear Bryant, Nic Bishop as Woodlawn’s coach, Tandy Gerelds, and Caleb Castille who plays Nathan in his first film. Technically, evangelical films have come a long way.”

Caleb Castille was originally hired as a stunt double for the British actor who was picked to play Tony Nathan, but visa complications left the Erwins scrambling to find a last-minute replacement. Only then did they discover Caleb’s audition tape.

Caleb Castille won two national championship rings with the University of Alabama before he sensed God was calling him out of football to pursue an acting career instead. His father, Jeremiah Castille, played with Tony Nathan on the 1979 Alabama Crimson Tide national championship team.

Still, Leithart was left dissatisfied by Woodlawn. “I think there are a number of reasons for that dissatisfaction, but at base the problem is theological (ain’t it always).

“Evangelicalism is a word religion. I’m a big fan of words, but even talking pictures aren’t fundamentally about words. It’s no accident that the hall of fame for directors has a large share of Catholics (Fellini, Hitchcock, Scorsese), Orthodox (Tarkovsky, Eisenstein), and sacramental Protestants (Bergman, Malick). This can’t be the whole story, of course, since aniconic Judaism has produced some of the world’s great filmmakers. But there’s something to it: Evangelical films over-explain, over-talk. They don’t trust the images to do the work.

“I suspect a more sacramentally oriented evangelicalism, an evangelicalism more attuned to types and symbols in scripture, would make better films.

“Evangelicalism is also a conversionist faith. The key crisis of life is the moment of commitment to Christ. In Woodlawn, most of the characters convert early in the film, necessarily so because the story is about the effect of the revival on race relations. But that means that the line of character development is flat. The really crucial character development has taken place in the moment of conversion. The main exception is Coach Gerelds, and not surprisingly, it’s Coach Gerelds who ends up being the dramatic focus of the film, the character whose emotions and motivations we get to know best.

“Theologically speaking, character development is ‘sanctification.’ A conversionist form of Christianity places less emphasis on sanctification than on conversion and justification. In films, that translates into drastic oversimplification of human psychology. For evangelicals, there are only two sets of motivations, as there are two kinds of people: Saved and unsaved. While that is ultimately true, it is not the whole story.”

Woodlawn, distributed by Pure Flix Entertainment, owned by David. A.R. White, raised in a small Mennonite farming town outside of Dodge City, Kansas, brothers Kevin and Bobby Downes, and Michael Scott, did impressively better perhaps with the very secular Rotten Tomatoes, which is by no means always kind to either evangelical or high school football films, and is the leading online aggregator of movie reviews from a mix of professional critics and its community of users, with an overall score of 77 per cent, and an audience score of 82 per cent (earning a “full popcorn bucket”) meaning the movie received 3.5 stars or higher by Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes users. Rotten Tomatoes noted under “Critics consensus: No consensus yet.” Rotten Tomatoes is part of Fandango’s portfolio of digital properties.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Time dilation, Daylight Saving Time and Other Mysteries of Time

 

In 1983, Ohio State University historian Stephen Kern wrote The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918, a book which talked about the sweeping changes in technology and culture that reshaped life, including the theory of relativity and introduction of Sir Sandford Fleming’s worldwide Standard Time – and an onrush of technics, including telephone, electric lighting, steamships, skyscrapers, bicycles, cinema, airplanes, X-rays, machine guns, as well as cultural innovations that shattered older forms of art and thought, such as the stream-of-consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, simultaneous poetry. All of these things created new ways of understanding and experiencing time and space during that almost 40-year period ending with the end of the First World War. Kern’s argument is that in the modern preoccupation with speed, especially with the fast and impersonal telegraph, international diplomacy broke down in July 1914, leading to the outbreak of the First World War the following month.

In physics, according to Albert Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity (SR), motion in space alters the flow of time, creating a time dilation, speeding up or slowing down time, because as you move through space, time itself is measured differently for the moving object than the unmoving object. This, in theory, would allow time travel within the known laws of physics into the future, not into the past.

I had a very odd experience, more akin to what Kern wrote about 33 years ago than Einsteinian physics, I suppose, where time was a product of perception – in this instance slowing down, rather than speeding up – back on Feb. 9, 2015, when I began working as a library clerk on the new Thompson campus of University College of the North (UCN) at the intersection of Thompson Drive North and UCN Drive.

I decided, probably not wisely in retrospect, to bicycle to work my first night, taking the then newly paved but snow-covered two-lane multi-use boulevard pathway for pedestrians and cyclists that then ran pretty much from behind my house all the way down to UCN (it now runs even further to Cree Road). While I had been riding all winter, very little of it until that point had been on the multi-use boulevard pathway toward UCN. I was also using an unfamiliar bicycle with some chain-dropping problems that first night.

The result was too little time and heavy exertion, not wanting to be late for work my first night. I thought I had given myself plenty of time for my 6:30 p.m. start, but conditions were more adverse than I anticipated. The ride is two kilometres, the last half kilometre or so from about the Giant Tiger department store to campus.

I distinctly remember checking the wristwatch on my left wrist four of five times under street lights as I pushed as hard as I could that last half-kilometre stretch. The oddest thing was the first three or four times, the hands on the analog display showed 6:28 p.m. – as if time was standing still, although my bicycle was in motion with me aboard. It wasn’t until I got to the door at UCN, the watch seemed to move that last two minutes to show exactly 6:30 p.m. on the dot. I have no rational explanation for what happened. Did the minute hand on my watch get stuck briefly and then free itself and jump ahead the two minutes? Maybe, but it didn’t feel like that.

Speaking of rational, under Manitoba’s Official Time Act, Daylight Saving Time (DST) begins on the second Sunday in March and continues until the first Sunday in November. That means it begins tomorrow. How rational Daylight Saving Time is; well that continues to be a matter of some debate.

The official time change to Daylight Saving Time occurs at 2 a.m., Sunday, March 13, at which time clocks should be set ahead to 3 a.m.

While it has been gradually remaining lighter later in the evening since late December here in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re about to get an even bigger early evening light boost Sunday. Tonight the sun sets here in Thompson, Manitoba at Latitude 56° 19.8′ North at 6:31 p.m. Central Standard Time (CST), according to National Research Council (NRC) of Canada calculations. Tomorrow sunset here is at 7:33 p.m. Central Daylight Saving Time (CDT).  Presto! In the course of a single day, we’ve picked up another hour and two minutes of daylight in the evening. And by the time the spring equinox arrives March 20 here in Thompson, we’ll be seeing about the same amount of hours of daylight as night, with sunrise at 7:33 a.m., and sunset at 7:48 p.m. Come the summer solstice June 20, don’t be surprised if we’re out on the dock at the Paint Lake Marina, a bit south of here, fishing until almost 11 p.m., as sunset won’t be until 10:26 p.m., while the end of civil twilight, defined as the centre of the sun’s disk at six degrees below the horizon, and the limit at which illumination is sufficient, under good weather conditions, for terrestrial objects to be clearly distinguished; the horizon is clearly defined and the brightest stars are visible under good atmospheric conditions, won’t be for more than an hour later at 11:30 p.m. CDT.

While fishing until midnight on the dock sounds pretty appealing right about now, as Lucas Powers pointed out earlier today in an interesting online CBC News story headlined “Daylight saving time 2016: How big business benefits from more sunshine. Longer daylight time has nothing to do with saving energy or benefiting farmers, critics say, which you can read at http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/daylight-saving-business-energy-1.3485281, as it outlines how the biggest long-time (pardon the pun) advocates for Daylight Saving Time over the years has been no other than the big business lobby. Tufts University professor Michael Downing wrote a book, Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, on the phenomena 10 years ago.

The Alexandria, Virginia-based Association for Convenience & Petroleum Retailing, formerly known as the National Association of Convenience Stores, founded in August 1961, loves Daylight Saving Time. Likewise big-box stores, sporting and recreational goods manufacturers, barbecue and charcoal retailers, lawn and garden retailers, shopping malls and golf courses. Surprise.

For this, we can thank (or blame) George Vernon Hudson, an English-born New Zealand amateur entomologist and astronomer who gave the world Daylight Saving Time (DST). Hudson’s day (and sometimes night) job was as a clerk (eventually chief clerk) in the post office in the capital of Wellington on North Island, and, in all fairness, Hudson could hardly be accused of being a shill for big business. They just picked up on Hudson’s idea in time, so to speak, and ran with it.

Standard Time, of course, with its standardized times zones, is a Canadian invention, courtesy of Sir Sanford Fleming, conveniently divided into hourly segments, and dating back to October 1884 and the International Prime Meridian Conference attended by 25 nations in Washington, D.C. Before Fleming invented standard time, noon in Kingston, Ontario was 12 minutes later than noon in Montréal and 13 minutes before noon in Toronto. Noon local time was the time when the sun stood exactly overhead.

Most of Canada’s time experts work in a place called Building M-36 (which involuntarily conjures up for me visions of the X-Files and Area 51.) They work in the Frequency and Time program in the Measurement Science and Standards portfolio with the National Research Council of Canada on Montreal Road in Ottawa. Physicist Rob Douglas, a principal research officer in the Frequency and Time group, however, can be found on Saskatchewan Drive in Edmonton.

Fleming’s genius was to create 24 time zones and within each zone the clocks would indicate the same time, with a one-hour difference between adjoining zones. Usually, when one travels in an easterly direction, a different time zone is crossed every 15 degrees of longitude, which is equal to one hour in time.

But on the other side of the world in New Zealand, Hudson had a somewhat different interest a decade or so after Fleming’s development of Standard Time.  Hudson’s shift-work job gave him enough leisure time to collect insects, and led him to value after-work hours of daylight for that pursuit when he was working days. On Oct.15, 1895, spring in New Zealand, he presented a paper called “On Seasonal Time-adjustment in Countries South of Lat. 30°”  to the Wellington Philosophical Society, proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift, and after considerable interest was expressed in Christchurch on South Island, where 1,000 copies of his paper were printed in 1896, he followed up on Oct. 8, 1898 with a second paper, “On Seasonal Time,” also presented to the  Wellington Philosophical Society in springtime, and which can be found in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, housed at the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington.

While interest grew in  Hudson’s Daylight Saving Time ideas between 1895 and 1898, they were hardly greeted by a rousing show of unanimous support when he presented his first paper in Wellington on Oct. 15, 1895, according to  the abstract in Volume 28, 1895 of the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, which noted, “The author proposed to alter the time of the clock at the equinoxes so as to bring the working-hours of the day within the period of daylight, and by utilizing the early morning, so reduce the excessive use of artificial light which at present prevails.

“Mr. Travers said the clocks could be managed by having different hands. He did not think we were far enough advanced to adopt the plan advocated by the author of the paper.

“Mr. Harding said that the only practical part of Mr. Hudson’s paper had long since been anticipated by Benjamin Franklin, one of whose essays denounced the extravagance of making up for lost daylight by artificial light. Mr. Hudson’s original suggestions were wholly unscientific and impracticable. If he really had found many to support his views, they should unite and agitate for a reform.

“Mr. Maskell said that the mere calling the hours different would not make any difference in the time. It was out of the question to think of altering a system that had been in use for thousands of years, and found by experience to be the best. The paper was not practical.

“Mr. Hawthorne did not see any difficulty in carrying out the views advocated so ably by Mr. Hudson.

“Mr. Hustwick was of opinion that the reform spoken of would have to wait a little longer.

“Mr. Richardson said that it would be a good thing if the plan could be applied to the young people.

“Mr. Hudson, in reply, said that he was sorry to see the paper treated rather with ridicule. He intended it to be practical. It was approved of by those much in the open air. There would be no difficulty in altering the clocks.”

While Hudson may he have been somewhat discouraged by that initial reception, he was far from defeated, so he was back before the Wellington Philosophical Society with his second paper on the subject three years later in October 1898:

“In order to more fully utilize the long days of summer, it is proposed on the 1st October of each year to put the standard time on two hours by making 12 (midnight) into 2 a.m., whilst on the 1st March the time would be put back two hours by making 2 a.m. into 12 (midnight), thus reverting to the present time arrangements for the winter months,” wrote Hudson in 1898.

“The effect of this alteration would be to advance all the day’s operations in summer two hours compared with the present system. In this way the early-morning daylight would be utilised, and a long period of daylight leisure would be made available in the evening for cricket, gardening, cycling, or any other outdoor pursuit desired. It will no doubt be urged that people are at present quite at liberty to make use of the early-morning daylight in summer without any such drastic alteration in the established order of things as is here suggested. To this objection it may be pointed out that, living as we do in a social community, we are unable to separate ourselves from the habits of those around us. We cannot individually alter our times of going to bed or getting up, but must fall in with the habits of the majority – at all events, to a great extent, Again, under the present arrangement, those who desire to utilise the early-morning daylight are compelled to take some of their recreation before their daily work and some afterwards, which in many cases results in their having to forgo pursuits that they would be enabled to follow successfully if their daylight leisure were continuous  … The foregoing remarks are framed to apply to us in the Southern Hemisphere, but with the seasons reversed they’ would, of course, apply with equal force to the Northern; Hemisphere.”

While Vernon’s self interest in Daylight Saving Time stemmed at least in part from his interest in collecting insects during a  longer evening, along with such other genteel pursuits by his countrymen as  cricket, gardening and cycling, it wouldn’t be until 18 years later that his DST proposals would be implemented in a modified form in a very different military context in the midst of the First World War by  Germany and Austria at 11 p.m. on April 30, 1916, when they advanced the hands of the clock one hour until the following October.  The rationale was simple: conserve fuel needed to produce electric power. Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Turkey and Tasmania immediately followed suit, as did Manitoba and Nova Scotia here in Canada. Britain also followed three weeks later on May 21, 1916. In 1917, Australia and Newfoundland began DST.

The United States followed on March 31, 1918 and Daylight Saving Time was observed for seven months in 1918 and 1919, but was largely unpopular and Americans used in variably and inconsistently for decades afterwards. The most recent change in the United States, pursuant to the Energy Policy Act of 2005, adding parts of March and November to DST, came into effect in 2007, and has been adopted by most Canadian jurisdictions to keep in synchronization with American business and government interests. The operative word is “most,” however, as there are a slew of Canadian exceptions to the general norm.

Most of British Columbia is on Pacific Time and observes DST, but there are two main exceptions: Part of the Peace River Regional District, including the communities of Chetwynd, Dawson Creek, Hudson’s Hope, Fort St. John, Taylor and Tumbler Ridge, are on Mountain Time and do not observe DST. This means that the region’s clocks are the same as those in Calgary and Edmonton in the winter, and they are the same as those in Vancouver in the summer.

The East Kootenay region of southeastern British Columbia, including the communities of Cranbrook, Fernie, Golden and Invermere, are on Mountain Time and observe DST, meaning the region is always on the same time as Calgary. An exception is Creston, which observes MST year-round. Clocks in Creston match those in Calgary in the winter, and Vancouver in the summer.

While the rest of Nunavut observes DST, Southampton Island, including Coral Harbour, remains on Eastern Standard Time throughout the year. The Kitikmeot Region including Cambridge Bay observes DST but is on Mountain Time.

Most of Ontario uses DST, but Pickle Lake, New Osnaburgh, and Atikokan, located within the Central Time Zone in Northwestern Ontario, all observe Eastern Standard Time all year long.

Most of Quebec also uses DST. However, the eastern part of Quebec’s North Shore, east of 63° west longitude, are in the Atlantic Time Zone, but do not observe DST for the most part, meaning in summer their clocks match those of the rest of the province, while in November, their clocks are match Atlantic Standard Time (AST) in the Maritimes. Although places east of 63° west are officially on Atlantic Time, local custom is to use Eastern Time as far east as the Natashquan River. Those communities observe DST, including all of Anticosti Island, which is bisected by the 63rd meridian. Les Îles de la Madeleine observe DST and are on Atlantic Time.

Although Saskatchewan is geographically within the Mountain Time zone, the province is officially part of the Central Time zone. As a result, while most of Saskatchewan does not change clocks spring and fall, it technically observes DST year round. This means that clocks in most of the province match clocks in Winnipeg during the winter and Calgary and Edmonton during the summer. This time zone designation was implemented in 1966, when the Saskatchewan Time Act was passed in order to standardize time province-wide. Lloydminster, which is bisected by the Saskatchewan-Alberta provincial boundary, observes Mountain Time year-round, with DST, which in the summer synchronizes it with the rest of Saskatchewan. Along the Manitoba inter-provincial boundary, the small, remote Saskatchewan municipalities of Denare Beach and Creighton unofficially observe Central Daylight Time during the summer, keeping the same time as the larger neighbouring Town of Flin Flon here in Manitoba.

Just remember, you are about to pass briefly through The Twilight Zone. Nothing can happen tomorrow between 2:01 a.m. and 2:59 a.m. because those 59 minutes do not exist on March 13 this year or any when March day when Standard Time meets Daylight Saving Time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVSRm80WzZk

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