Link to the show: Young Adult Movie Ministry Vol. 2, Episode 9 on Substack
Release date: November 17, 2021
Movie of the Week
Arrival (2016), directed by Denis Villeneuve
[Streaming on Hulu (subscription), Digital Rental on Amazon Prime | Apple]
Who the Hosts Are This Week
Sam is reporter-at-large, editor of Forever Wars, and unusual visitor. Alissa is the film critic at Vox, author of the upcoming book Salty, and either Abbott or Costello.
Special Guest
Meg Conley is author of the newsletter homeculture.
Other Mentions
- Sam (getting the comics reference in) says that Amy Adams is like Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen
- St. Augustine and original sin
- The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (the linguistic theory that the semantic structure of a language shapes or limits the ways in which a speaker forms conceptions of the world)
- Ted Chiang’s book Arrival (the basis for the movie)
- Ferdinand de Saussure (Swiss linguist who suggested that words go in lines to represent the passage of time)
- Grant Morrison’s comic series The Invisibles
- The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli
- Dorothy Fortenberry talking about climate grief (I wasn’t able to locate the podcast episode Sam briefly mentioned)
- Alissa’s piece at Vox on the use of war metaphors for addressing pandemics
- NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast episode on the use of war metaphors to talk about climate change
- Max Brooks’s book World War Z
- Ronald D. Moore (creator of For All Mankind, executive producer of Battlestar Galactica, and producer of Star Trek: TNG)
- Alan Moore’s novel Jerusalem
What we learned today
Alissa: There’s something significant about a superior alien race that communicates using coffee stains.
Sam: Don’t leave your satellite phone unattended.
Meg: If we could learn to live in a circle, maybe we’d have less heaven-building and more fullness to life.