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Hmmm: Salon covers Cecil B. DeMille’s film The Ten Commandments on April Fool’s Day. Will this be an expose of shadowy McCarthyite figures who controlled the masses through kitsch? A celebration of DeMille (shown in a portrait by Yousuf Karsh) as a transgressive auteur? An irony-laden piece hailing the film as a masterpiece?
It’s good to see that the folks at the Harvard Divinity School know how to stage a media event that offers nuance and balance when dissecting one of the most controversial news stories of the season — the box-office smash “The Passion of the Christ.” Here are some of the viewpoints included in the press release by Beth Potier of the Harvard News Office:
We will not be observing April Fool’s Day here at GetReligion, in large part because the world already has plenty of religion news stories that verge on satire. Who needs to make this stuff up? Nevertheless, the people at Beliefnet plunged in there anyway, raising St. Oprah of the Mall of America to the status of Goddess and part of the newly formed Quadhead, which replaces the Trinity. Negotiators for the various faith groups involved also considered naming this innovation “the Quartet” or the “Quadrangel.”
The political and journalistic implications of that article by Jack Beatty are somewhat stunning, if you stop and think about it.
Jack Beatty, a senior editor at The Atlantic, once explained his understanding of rationalism on the public radio program OnPoint.
This week’s Time makes it official: the Socrates Café movement has trickled down to Middle America. You have to respect Christopher Phillips, founder of the Society for Philosophical Inquiry. He met and fell in love with his wife, Cecilia, when she was the only person to show up for one of his earlier cafés. Now they travel the country and live out of suitcases to spread the concept of everyday people gathering to discuss big questions.
This is one of those days when I had a column to write and classes to teach (and tonight is a massive pre-Holy Week choir practice). So I am following the link to Air America a bit, but not much.
The God-beat professionals at www.religionwriters.com have a biweekly listserv feature called ReligionLink that floats story ideas and resources for reporters who are looking for feature stories that spin off current events in the news.
In the April issue of Wired, Joshua Davis delivers an amazing report on Yitzhaq Hayutman, an English-born architect with a high-tech solution to Middle East conflicts: using lasers to project a restored Temple above the Dome of the Rock and, thus, to “induce the arrival of the Messiah and the coming of peace on Earth.”
