Eddington 2025: Masterpiece or Mess?

 

Eddington 2025

Ari Aster's COVID-19-and-BLM-themed film is either a masterpiece or a mess

Ari Aster is a 39-year-old American director, screenwriter, and producer. He was born in New York City. His poet mother and jazz musician father moved to England for a while, and then, when Aster was ten, the family moved to New Mexico. Aster has described his childhood self as a fat kid with a crippling stutter who was alienated from others, kicked out of prep school, and obsessed with horror films. "I've wanted to make my New Mexico movie since I was a kid," he says. In a YouTube video, Aster jokes about being "in the closet." When discussing a relationship, he refers to his significant other as "they" rather than "he" or "she." I have found no conclusive information about whether or not Aster is gay. Aster appears, in interviews, as a pale, slight, bespectacled, articulate, movie-obsessed nebbish.

His 2018 horror film Hereditary made a big splash. On July 18, 2025, Aster released Eddington, a "neo-Western." Eddington addresses COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, incest, prejudice against Native Americans, and societal breakdown caused by excessive internet use. Some hail Eddington as a "masterpiece." Plenty of other critics, both professional and amateur, argue that in Eddington, Aster bit off more than he could chew. The film never gels, they say, and the last act descends into violent chaos.

SEEC Shroud of Turin International Conference and Symposium: Scholars and seekers explore new research

 

SEEC Shroud of Turin International Conference and Symposium

Scholars and seekers explore new research

I recently had the great good fortune to attend the SEEC Shroud of Turin International Conference and Symposium in Florissant, roughly twenty miles northwest of St. Louis, Missouri. This conference was held between July 30 and August 3, 2025 on the 284 acres of the Augustine Institute, a Catholic graduate school. The campus includes lush woods, prairie restoration, walking paths to the Missouri River, and a two-story glass-walled dining room offering treetop views. Conference papers were presented by forty-nine speakers from at least seven nations with degrees from a variety of disciplines, including physics, chemistry, law, history, theology, medicine, mathematical modeling, crime lab analysis, and mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineering.

The Shroud of Turin is an approximately fourteen-feet by three-feet piece of linen cloth that bears an image of a man crucified as Jesus was, as described in the Gospels. Image features include puncture wounds on the head, where a crown of thorns might have penetrated the scalp, a side wound consistent with the size and shape of a Roman lance, beard-plucking, facial injury, and scourge marks. Some believe that the Shroud of Turin served as the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. Others insist that the Shroud is a reprehensible hoax. Controversy surrounds the Shroud, often described as the single most studied artifact in history.