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The real Big controversy

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I just finished watching this season’s second to last episode of HBO’s Big Love soap opera, and I believe there may be another hidden reason that the show makes Mormons uneasy. Much of the media’s attention has been on the fact that this episode portrayed a scene in a Mormon temple, however, the show did have one line that caught me: the main character expressly claimed that the Mormon church was just as corrupt as the show’s main antagonists who are practicing polygamy and generally in trouble with the law.


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Hilarity, culture war ensue over Tyler Perry

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Benjamin Svetkey, Margeau Watson and Alynda Wheat have written an impressive feature story for the March 20 Entertainment Weekly on what the magazine calls “black America’s secret culture war” surrounding playwright and filmmaker Tyler Perry.


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Out of sorrow, a new unity?

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It hardly seems nine years since Roman Catholics and Protestant foes vowed to co-exist peacably with one another in the 1998 Good Friday agreement. Last week’s killing of a Catholic policeman and two British soldiers (two splinter I.R. A group’s claimed responsibility for the killings) could have threatened that peace.


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Tiny Catholic stories in Saturday Sun

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If you are one of the scores of people who still get the tiny, dead-tree-pulp edition of The Baltimore Sun on Saturdays — the cartoons are now in the SPORTS section, because there’s no logical place to put them — then you may have seen a sad little page of religion content this morning in the all-purpose news section. If you hit the auto ads, you went too far.


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Irony in the Big apology

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There is some real irony in this week’s apology from HBO regarding their anticipated controversial portrayal of a Mormon temple’s “sacred endowment ceremony” in the amazingly entertaining and insightful Sunday night soap opera Big Love. The show, which features a Utah polygamous family dealing with the challenges if interacting with both the secular world and with their fundamentalist roots, is genuinely known for portraying conservative religious beliefs quite sympathetically. Some would even say that it is (arguably) “one of the most sympathetic portraits” of such beliefs.


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"Enough already"

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Mary Jordan of the Washington Post Foreign Service reports in today’s Post that Pope Benedict XVI wrote an “unusual letter” to “quiet” protests after his “embrace” of excommunicated bishop and conspiracy theorist Richard Williamson.


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Finding God at the Natural History Museum

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I am of the opinion that what drives some media narratives is less overt bias than a love for drama that pits one protagonist against another in competition for the lowest common denominator. But most people don’t live their daily lives on protest lines, or suing one another, or testifying before Congress.


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