Attack of the Borg!

For those of you that are interested:

The Oregon State University Socratic Club will feature a debate on the topic, "Who Is Jesus?" at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, May 10, in the Austin Auditorium of LaSells Stewart Center on the OSU Campus. Speakers are Dr. Marcus Borg, Hundere Distinguished Professor of Religion, and Dr. Gary Ferngren, Professor of History, both of Oregon State.

The debate will explore orthodox and revisionist views of Jesus, with the two speakers presenting widely divergent opinions. The discussion will focus on how we know about Jesus, the difference between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, and how Jesus shapes faith today.

Marcus Borg is a member of the Jesus Seminar and the author of more than a dozen books, including Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time.

Gary Ferngren has written extensively on medicine and healing in early Christianity and is the editor of Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction

The meeting is free and open to the public.

The Socratic Club is beginning its fourth year at OSU as a student organization. It is modelled on the original Socratic Club, which was founded at Oxford University in 1941 by C. S. Lewis to provide an open forum for the discussion of issues that divide Christians and non-Christians. At OSU the Club presents opposing points of view on subjects of contemporary debate related to the Christian faith. Each speaker is given 25 minutes to present one side of an issue, after which the two discuss their differences, before opening the floor to questions from members of the audience. Two events are planned for each quarter. For more information phone 602-3661 or see http://oregonstate.edu/groups/socratic.

Call me if you want to go. 928-1145

The Cross versus the Crescent

To follow up my last post, here's a link to Steven D. Greydanus of decentfilms.com who gives an excellent review of Kingdom of Heaven where he considers many of the issues of brought up in my previous post.

One of my biggest gripes about the media, academia, and pop culture in general is the way it views the past. Rather than viewing history in its context, we take a presentist point of view. That is, we view the past through the lens of the present. In doing so, we press the past into the service of the present for the purpose of justifying our points of view. For hollywood, this means applying modern ideas or notions to past events, judging by those standards, and making conclusions.

In the case of this movie, we use our standard of right and wrong, apply it to a time and place whose concerns were so completely different than our own as to make it virtually unrecognizable. While I can understand the need to find a connection to a modern audience and appeal to as many people as possible by not suggesting anything that would advocate one theology over another, I cannot stomach the main character preaching like an ACLU spokesman; not because it is right or wrong, but because its so contrived and disparate from reality. Worse, the filmakers don't trust their ability to tell a story, so they have to tell us what to think rather than leave the conclusion up their audience.

Kingdom of Heaven does a better job than most of getting right the names, places, and events. But the movie suffers from 21st century ideas applied to the 12th century. In other words, if we want to look to the past to understand the current struggle between Christians and Muslims (which was clearly a goal of the movie), then we must view the past in its own context, not as we would like to see it.

The Cross in film

I went to see Kingdom of Heaven last Friday. As you might guess from the title and the topic, it deals (however shallow) with the issue of Christianity. Strangely enough, the last two movies I saw before this one also take time to portray Christianity.

Sin City - I was the minority voice of those I attended this movie who thought the movie was awful. The visuals are cool, but that wears off after about ten minutes into the movie. Dialogue that one can accept in a comic book just sounds silly when real actors are speaking. The movie is overly violent (in fact, the violence is supposed be an art form itself), there' s plenty of skin (mainly boobs), and there is no character worth rooting for (with the possible exception of Hartigan). But to my point: the only religious (Christian, of course) characters in the movie are not only bad, but sadistic and evil. By the time our hero kills and maims his way through solving the mystery of his lover's murder, we find that a Cardinal was responsible for allowing and encouraging one of his own to murder hookers, eat them, and mount their heads on a wall like deer. Christianity is portrayed not better, nor equal to other characters/ideas/themes, but far worse.

Amityville Horror - Now I went to see this on one of those nights where you just want to see something in the theater. I didn't expect much and I wasn't disappointed. Turns out, the reason the house is so bad is because its haunted by the spirit of a 17th century Puritan preacher who performed sadistic and evil experimentation and torture on native americans to punish or convert them; I'm not sure (I think they teach something similar to this in high school history curriculums to describe Columbus' discovery of America). So it turns out that all the sick, psychotic things that happen to this family are because of a Christian preacher. It gets better though. In one scene, after the wife goes to the local parish to enlist the hope of the church, the priest, scared to death runs out of the house, hops in his car and bails on the family. Neither the church nor God has any power over or comfort from evil. Nice.

Kingdom of Heaven - Christian faith in this film is portryaed primarily in the form of zealots, a cruel priest, and a cowardly and cynical church father. Any theology described is usually negative, except that which bucks church doctrine and offers instead a sort of mushy new age alternative that is scarcely recognizable as Christian. The Muslims don't get the same treatment, but rather, they are portrayed as more just and merciful (which is hard to avoid since Saladin really was an admirable advesary). The main character, Balian, struggles (of course) with his faith, but manages to get up at the end of the film and preach a sort of modern hollywood sermon about tolerance.

While my take on these movies is seen through the lens of my particular worldview (which happens to be Christian), I don't think its a stretch to say that Christians theology is held in low regard if not with outright hostility in our popular culture.

Chinese Connection

A short discussion about China emerged on the comment page of one of Ted's posts on his blog. It got me thinking and I just happened to stumble on a really good article about the future of China in the world. I wasn't sure what to think. You cannot deny the sheer size of China. I wonder if they can maintain a successful ecomony under a communist regime. Recent history suggests otherwise, but 9% growth per year is unbelievable (although they can only go up).

I won't say that it scares me or anything. I will say that its a little unsettling. I'll probably be long dead before anything happens, but it should be interesting to see how the U.S.-China relationship develops in the next 50 years.