Results tagged “God”

In the fifth chapter of his 2007 book Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives, David Sloan Wilson writes:

“It turns out that something very similar to my desert-island thought experiment has been performed on chickens by a poultry scientist named William Muir.”

That probably sounds odd.

It will likely sound even odder when you find out what the desert-island thought experiment is: a set of three hypothetical situations to explore human morality through the lens of evolution.

A foolish person doesn’t recognize that one can learn much from opponents. So liberals have begun to understand that they need God on their side as much as the Christian Right does.

The lesson from conservatives, said Rabbi Michael Lerner, is that it’s okay to base policy on faith and spiritual values, and it’s important to stand up for what you believe in. “When they come to a decision about what they believe in, they fight for it,” he said of the Christian Right in a recent interview. “And they’re willing to lose an election for the sake of what they believe in.”

Robert Zemeckis’ Contact is a triumph of short-form —

What’s that?

Yes, I’m aware that Contact isn’t exactly short, but the Screen Actors Guild defines a feature film as a movie of 80 minutes or longer, and Contact’s 53-minute running —

Pardon me?

Yes, I know that Contact was 150 minutes long when it played in movie theaters. I’m not talking about that movie. It was terrible and interminable.

My version uses the same source material but starts at the 33-minute, 25-second mark and ends at one hour, 26 minutes, and five seconds. It’s a marvel of economy and —

Yes, as a matter of fact I do think you can chop off the first half-hour and the last hour of the theatrical version without losing —

What? You liked all that backstory and preface? You thought it was necessary? And you were satisfied with the way the movie dragged on, and ended &mdash and then ended again?

Now shut up and let me explain myself.

The first images of Jim Kurring involve his morning routine, and it’s nothing remarkable: He eats, he showers, he reads the paper, he exercises.

But there are little hints about how we’re supposed to react to him. He laughs out loud — and not very convincingly — at something on the Today show. When he’s lifting weights, we see one of those inspirational posters encouraging “determination.” And he prays, on his knees at the foot of his bed, with a cross looking down upon him. When he finishes, he gets up and claps his hands together once, as if Team God had just broken from the huddle. We learn through voice-over that he participates in some dating service, or at the least runs a personal ad. He’s a cop, and he gives himself a pep talk in the squad car.

At Strange Culture, RC is hosting the Film + Faith Blog-a-thon, running through November 9. (The announcement is here.)

I’m hoping for a diverse, engaging, thoughtful, and provocative batch of essays, because the spiritual component of movies is critical but often neglected. People gravitate toward films that make them feel good — an effect on the soul — even if they typically don’t examine the reasons. Sometimes we must decide how movies fit into our spiritual/moral world view, a topic that Will Gray explores in his lovely contribution.

I’ve resurrected (boooooooo!) old essays on morality and movies and the Exorcist prequels as offerings, and I plan to write at least one other thing. (This essay on Requiem probably fits, too. Hell, so does this thing I posted yesterday.) I wish the blog-a-thon were longer, because I have several other things I’d like to write about.

Near the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, spiritual-documentary filmmaker Martin Doblmeier conducted a survey on his Web site. He asked whether people supported constructing a “garden of forgiveness” at Ground Zero in New York City.

Thousands of votes later, the results were overwhelming: Roughly 95 percent of respondents said “no.”

Although he wrote and directed The Power of Forgiveness, Doblmeier offered this anecdote in a recent phone interview without judgment. His point was that forgiveness is something that spiritual people tend to embrace as an abstract concept, but putting it into practice is shockingly difficult. For many, he said, forgiveness is the equivalent of a spare tire, something you “keep ... in the back of the trunk and hope to God you never need it.”

Sometimes the biggest gift a film can give us is to force us back into the real world rather than letting us escape.

Many people watch movies as a respite from the stresses of life, but that often has a trivializing effect. When film is used primarily as a medium for entertainment, it follows that we derive pleasure from crime, violence, human suffering, and the like.

The German movie Requiem is about demonic possession, yet in spite of its subject matter, it’s a serious, wrenching piece. And because of its subject matter, it’s all the more effective, as the audience isn’t expecting to be challenged.

Why does nobody take the frogs seriously? Why does nobody question them?

In Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, the cataclysmic, apocalyptic rain of frogs seems — outside of this essay’s titular question, posed in the movie by nurse Phil Parma — casually accepted. Nobody else says: “That’s some fucked-up shit, those frogs.”

And I guess it’s a testament to Anderson’s script, direction, tone, pacing, and heavy foreshadowing that I’ve never heard anybody say anything along the lines of: “You know, I was with it right up until the frogs.” I led a small-group discussion on the movie last year, and nobody had any problem with the amphibians, and nobody ascribed a grand meaning to them. As Stanley Spector says in the library, with wide eyes but no curiosity: “This happens. This is something that happens.”

If we’re comparing Superman and Christ, let’s not ignore what seems a fairly blatant artistic reference in the current campaign for Superman Returns, to Salvador Dali’s Christ of St. John of the Cross (top) and Crucifixion (bottom):

(I’m not the first to note the similarity.)

Jim Emerson directed me to this fascinating article from The Journal of Religion and Film.

The piece is remarkable less for its topic — a comparison of Superman to Jesus Christ — than its approach. In its analysis, the thorough, sometimes smart, and often laughable article uses the first two Christopher Reeve Superman movies as its text for the Man of Steel. That’s akin to using the movie The Last Temptation of Christ as the authoritative source on Jesus’ life. It comes across as really lazy, a corner cut to avoid having to read decades of comic books.

David Plotz of Slate is undertaking a fascinating project with a terrible name: “Blogging the Bible.” It starts here and is a mix of snarky commentary and a close reading rooted in genuine curiosity. Both can be found in this passage:

“When He rejects the vegan special, God chastises Cain with this advice. ‘Sin couches at the door; Its urge is toward you, Yet you can be its master.’ This is just about the best advice you can give anyone. It is conservative idealism, compressed into a sentence: We must decide for ourselves to do right. Not that Cain pays attention: He kills his brother in the very next verse.”

As an agnostic, the conclusion of Paul Schraeder’s Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist was deeply unsatisfying. Evil is unleashed on an eastern African town, and it is expelled by the power of ... God?

You might reasonably ask: What the hell did you expect, asshole?

It’s a fair question, but it’s not quite that simple.

The Arts & Faith Web site last month posted its list of the “Top 100 Spiritually Significant Films.”

Some of the more interesting choices: Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction and Bad Lieutenant; Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves and Dogville; Kevin Smith’s Dogma; David Fincher’s Fight Club; Monty Python’s Life of Brian; and Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.

Incidentally, from experience, these are thoughtful, insightful, smart Christians. One of them called me a “benighted heathen” and a “perfidious troglodyte.”

I’ve been fascinated for a few months by the cleverly titled Web site Decent Films, whose slogan is “film appreciation, information, and criticism informed by Christian faith.” The site has an abundance of thoughtful writing about movies, and it’s frequently clever and funny. Still, there’s something disturbing about it.

If you want a perfect example of how great material can transcend its treatment, watch HBO’s recent two-part mini-series of Angels in America.