Frederica Mathewes-Green is a wide-ranging author who has published 11 books and 800 essays, in such diverse publications as the Washington Post, Christianity Today, Smithsonian, and the Wall Street Journal. She has been a regular commentator for National Public Radio (NPR), a columnist for the Religion News Service, Beliefnet.com, and Christianity Today, and a podcaster for Ancient Faith Radio. (She was also a consultant for Veggie Tales.) She has published 11 books, and has appeared as a speaker over 600 times, at places like Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Wellesley, Cornell, Calvin, Baylor, and Westmont, and received a Doctor of Letters (honorary) from King University. She has been interviewed over 700 times, on venues like PrimeTime Live, the 700 Club, NPR, PBS, Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times. She lives with her husband, the Rev. Gregory Mathewes-Green, in Johnson City, TN. Their three children are grown and married, and they have fifteen grandchildren.
[Ancient Faith Radio; January 30, 2008]
There was a time, back in May of 2006, when The da Vinci Code movie was just about to come out, and then did come out and cause a lot of consternation among Christians of every description, Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox—controversy about this whole phenomenon, the terrifically popular pop novel, The Da Vinci Code, and the high profile Hollywood movie that was made of that book. And a lot of worry about how can we respond to something that seems to be grasping the imagination of so many people, when you can hardly engage it; the basic ideas are so preposterous that it doesn’t have any historic grounding, you don’t know how to grapple with it.
I love movies like this. But, sad to say, I didn’t love this movie. I hoped I would, but one clunker after another kept accumulating—a hackneyed character here, a stupid line of dialogue there—until it was sounding like a sneaker in a dryer.
That’s too bad, because this format has been the foundation of some terrific, thought-provoking films. You take a sizeable number of characters, most of whom have never met, and set their stories in motion. As the multiple plots unfold, each character is being drawn closer to the center, where a resolution awaits that, in the best of these films, can be simultaneously unexpected and inevitable. Let’s coin a term and call them “drawstring” movies, a subset of the genre known as “ensemble” films.
[Ancient Faith Radio; January 23, 2008]
I’m recording this on January 22nd, 2008, the 35th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion all through America—through all 50 states, through all nine months of pregnancy.People question that sometimes, because the Roe decision says that abortion should be available to a woman under any circumstances, until the point of viability.It said that, after that, states can begin to have some laws protecting the unborn child, after viability.But there’s a companion decision to Roe v. Wade, called Doe v. Bolton.It came down the same day, and it governs how that proposed post-viability period can be legislated in the states.It says that states may do nothing to restrict a woman’s access to abortion if she wants the abortion for some aspect of her health.Well, the result is that you can have a legal abortion at almost any point in pregnancy if you are willing to travel for it.There are specialists who go into these post-viability late-term abortions, that’s what they specialize in offering.
[Ancient Faith Radio; January 16, 2008]
This is another one of those times when I’m someplace and kind of embarrassed to say where I am. I’m in the parking lot of an all-you-an-eat buffet restaurant; this one’s a Golden Corral. I’m about to go in and have some dinner. And this is one of my secret techniques at being a writer, that when I have a lot of stuff I need to go through, a lot of paper, like when I’ve gotten the manuscript of a book back from the editor and I need to look at every page and see what all the suggestions and changes are, this is my plan: I go to an all-you-can-eat place and I put the big stack of paper on the table and I’ll get salad and then I’ll read for a half hour. And then I’ll get some vegetables and then read for another half hour. And just stretch it out and make it a little more cheerful than it might otherwise be.
[Ancient Faith Radio; January 9, 2008]
Frederica: Here we are, still hurtling along.This will air a week later, but I just broke there so that we could continue this fascinating conversation we’re having about ancient Rome, so that we could make it into two podcasts instead of one.I am in a car being driven with extreme competence and safety by my prayer partner Colleen Oren, who is the choir director at Holy Cross Church.Also in the front seat is Ina O’Dell, Shamassey Ina, wife of Deacon Mark.And we have our monthly breakfast where we get together and share our prayer requests, and our husbands think we get together to talk about them, but that just shows their suspicious minds.[Laughter] And today we’re going way out in the country to sort of a country family restaurant for breakfast, and I’ve been talking to Ina about what she saw in Rome about ancient Orthodox Christianity in Rome, and the very, very early churches that she saw.You have so much to say.How long were you there, like a week?
[Ancient Faith Radio; June 2, 2008]
Frederica: The wheels are turning on the pavement and we’re hurtling north-westward.[Laughter] I’m making this sound like a dramatic story here.We’re on I-795, hitting the pavement, as Colleen Oren, choir director at Holy Cross Church, intrepidly, courageously, and bravely drives her car forward, westward, into the cold.It’s sort of a chilly morning today.Colleen is one of my prayer partners, and so is Ina O’Dell who is sitting next to her in the front seat. Shamassey Ina, the wife of our deacon, Mark O’Dell.And I thought, now that we’re all trapped together in this one car for half an hour to get out there to the restaurant—we’re going out to a restaurant, sort of a country restaurant, and a fair trade store that’s nearby.Now that we’re on this expedition, I wanted to corral Ina and have her tell me about something.Ina and Mark went to Rome - it was something related to his work, wasn’t it? What was it that he was going for?
[Ancient Faith Radio; December 26, 2007]
Recently I was interviewed for a TV program about the star, the star of Bethlehem, and some of the things that I found out as I was researching it, were pretty interesting to me. Some things about the star, other things about the wise men, or the magi. And here’s the first one: the Bible doesn’t say there were three of them. It just says ‘Wise men from the east.’ It doesn’t say how many. Perhaps there were three. There were three gifts, the gold, frankincense and myrrh, so perhaps that’s where the idea came from, that there were three of them.
[Christianity Today Movies; December 21, 2007] This will sound like an odd thing to say about a comedy, but “Walk Hard” is an ambitious movie. It starts with 6-year-old Dewey Cox picking up a guitar in a rural general store and belting out a blues number, and proceeds to show…
[Ancient Faith Radio; December 19, 2007]
Recently I was interviewed by a TV show, Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, which appears on PBS, for a story they were doing about the Bethlehem star. And the interviewer told me that she had talked to an astronomer and another person, a Christian, who had done a lot of research into the astronomical records that were kept by the Chinese and by the Egyptians. And there are various theories—you know, a lot of people have theories about what dramatic heavenly event it could have been that would have brought constellations together, or brought comets together or something to fill the role of that star.
[Christianity Today Movies, Dec 7, 2007] Movies are great at sweeping an audience up into intense emotions and experiences; even when a plot is flimsy, a good roller-coaster ride can be worth the price of admission. It’s not so easy to make a movie about something that isn’t happening. In “Grace is Gone,” what doesn’t happen (at least not for a very long time) is a dad breaking the news to his daughters that their mom is dead. We watch him not tell them in the living room, in the car, in restaurants, in motels, at an amusement park – he doesn’t tell them all the way from the upper Midwest to Florida. He grimaces and weeps, he calls his own answering machine to hear Grace’s recorded voice, but he can’t bring himself to get it out to the girls. The whole movie is like being stuck in bed with a cold.