[Touchstone, April 2003]
Why They Hated “Pinocchio”
I am the sole member of a very tiny club: as far as I can tell, I am the only reviewer in America who liked Roberto Benigno’s production of “Pinocchio.” I had sat all alone in a theater, thoroughly charmed by the production, the costumes, cinematography, and performances. And I wondered why I was alone. Later I checked a website that catalogues film reviews and did a double take. This site gives films a percentage score based on the number of positive reviews; the stylish film “The Hours,” for example, was enjoying an 88% rating. The site’s editors had not found a single review of “Pinocchio” they could classify as positive. “Pinocchio” scored a zero.
[Our Sunday Visitor, March 23, 2003]
Well, not hot dog, exactly. Not hamburger either, or fried chicken, or filet-o-fish; not even a milkshake. And that’s no baloney.
What’s left? Grains, vegetables, and fruits: oatmeal for breakfast, peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, spaghetti marinara for dinner. You get to know the mysteries of soy. (My friend Juli sings: “You made me tofu; I didn’t wanna try it, I thought I’d rather diet.”)
[Our Sunday Visitor, April 6, 2003]Bringing Down the HouseThere are many ways a movie can be bad. It can be badly written, badly acted, badly filmed; it can have a bad plot, a bad premise, or a bad message. “Bringing Down the House” is bad in all these conventional ways, but then invents new ways to be bad, and sets race relations back forty years. It's the decathlon of badness.
[Unpublished, March 2003]
I subscribe to a newsweekly magazine. One week the cover story is about Buddhists. I read the article. It is about spirituality.
Another week the cover story is about students of the Kaballah. I read the article. It is about spirituality.
Another week the cover story is about Christians. I read the article. It is about politics.
[Unpublished, March 2003]
I'm a pastor's wife, mom of three, short, plump and southern, so people are generally surprised to hear that I was once under investigation by the FBI for making death threats on behalf of the Mafia.
It could happen to anyone, really.
One night we were having dinner with a couple in our congregation, Bob and Cathy, while our combined five kids played downstairs in the rec room. My husband's gingery Chinese stirfry was disappearing fast, and Cathy's special Chocolate Overload cake was waiting in the kitchen.
Modern Reformation, March 2003]
FREE SPACE
An Interview with Frederica Mathews-Green: The Church-A View From the East
The author of numerous books, most recently, The Illumined Heart, Frederica Mathewes-Green is a commentator on NPR's Morning Edition, a book reviewer for the Los Angeles Times and a columnist for Beliefnet.com. Her book, Facing East, charts her movement from being an evangelical Episcopalian to her embrace of Eastern Orthodoxy. Among other things, we asked Frederica to help us understand why a number of evangelicals are attracted to Orthodoxy.
[Our Sunday Visitor, March 2, 2003]
What is it about the Civil War? We can’t quite get over it. It’s a story we tell ourselves over and over, never sure we’ve gotten it right.
There’s good reason for that. It’s a complex story, and the easy categories of South Bad, North Good don’t do it justice. Yet, just to demonstrate our ambivalence, it’s the South we pine for. More reenactors want to be Rebs than Yanks. No Northern gal holds the heart-place of Scarlett O’Hara. You can attribute this to romanticizing the losing side, but nobody romanticizes Hitler.
[Today's Christian, March-April 2003]
Is Suicide Unforgivable?
Q. We got into a discussion in my Bible class about whether Christians who commit suicide go to heaven. I always thought that God forgives everything, except the unforgivable sin of not accepting him. But others in my class hold different views. I have two questions: (1) Do Christians who commit suicide go to heaven? and (2) What is the “unforgivable sin”? --Carly M. Spokane, Washington
[Beliefnet, March 2003]
Since they debuted their after-the-Rapture thriller series a decade or so ago, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins have not aimed their “Left Behind” books at pleasing the sophisticated elite, the so-called “chattering classes.” It's not great lit, and doesn't pretend to be. (Personally, I gave up a few pages into the first volume, when a character was introduced this way: “His coworkers called him Buck, because he was always bucking the rules.”)
But the idea behind the series is nothing if not gripping.
[Dallas Morning News, February 1, 2003]
My husband came into my office one day to find me frowning at the computer screen. “I'm stuck,” I said. “I can't figure out how to make repentance sound appealing.”
In the ten years since I became a member of the Orthodox Church, that's been the biggest surprise to me: the unfolding joy of repentance. Every year about this time we get onto the long on-ramp to Lent, which will begin March 10 and last for seven long weeks till Easter (we call it Pascha). It's an intensely penitential time, marked by many extra church services and intensified fasting. I can't wait.
