Harry Potter Is Christopher Hitchens' Best Friend
Thursday, July 12, 2007

First Harry Potter is bad for reading. Now he's bad for God. What's next: England?

Rowling's work is so familiar that we've forgotten how radical it really is. Look at her literary forebears. In The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien fused his ardent Catholicism with a deep, nostalgic love for the unspoiled English landscape. C.S. Lewis was a devout Anglican whose Chronicles of Narnia forms an extended argument for Christian faith. Now look at Rowling's books. What's missing? If you want to know who dies in Harry Potter, the answer is easy: God.

Harry Potter lives in a world free of any religion or spirituality of any kind. He lives surrounded by ghosts but has no one to pray to, even if he were so inclined, which he isn't. Rowling has more in common with celebrity atheists like Christopher Hitchens than she has with Tolkien and Lewis.

What does Harry have instead of God? Rowling's answer, at once glib and profound, is that Harry's power comes from love. This charming notion represents a cultural sea change. In the new millennium, magic comes not from God or nature or anything grander or more mystical than a mere human emotion. In choosing Rowling as the reigning dreamer of our era, we have chosen a writer who dreams of a secular, bureaucratized, all-too-human sorcery, in which psychology and technology have superseded the sacred.

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Posted by B Feiler at 9:13 PM 0 comments

Free Rickie Lee
Wednesday, June 27, 2007

A reader writes in response to my post on musicians finding God. [I have deleted a few things from this email to protect the identity of the writer.]

Dear Bruce,

I have greatly enjoyed your writing, and have shared your books with several friends over the years, giving them as gifts. Great work. You've provided a valuable perspective.

I don't know, however, why you ask "what's with musicians and conversion?" or something of that nature. Why is this interesting? Musicians are people, like everyone else, like writers, carpenters, poets, plumbers, etc. Rickie was inspired to work from [a book of] music and spoken word based on the words of Christ. It was an exploration, and she was caught up in that search for myriad and probably even unkown (to her, to us) reasons. It was a natural and somewhat (on Rickie's part) unpremeditated process, as are most of life's meaningful experiences. We wake up one morning and life has led us to a point where we confront and respond to some questions, and possible answers (in this case in the words of Jesus) that were not there yesterday.

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Posted by B Feiler at 1:53 PM 0 comments

Let Noah Drink in Peace
Monday, June 25, 2007

The flood of Noah products has finally crested. Evan bombed. (So did Danny Pearl, sadly. Hard to see the Hollywood in this story I dare say.) David Plotz thinks he knows why.

Did anyone involved with Evan Almighty actually read the Noah story? You know, the part when God drowns the entire world, when "all in whose nostrils was the merest breath of life, all that was on dry land, died. All existence on earth was blotted out, man, cattle, creeping things, and birds of the sky; they were blotted from the earth." Now, I'm no great religious scholar, but it doesn't take Pope Benedict to see that the Noah story is not a charming little tale about familial love, but a terrifying lesson about our dependence on God: a warning that we are alone in the world and always at the mercy of a wrathful and demanding Lord.

Evan Almighty, a drab retelling of the Noah story as a comic ecofable, is Hollywood's latest and—with a $200 million budget—most expensive pander at the Christian market. Ever since the success of The Passion of the Christ in 2004, studios have been hurling money at Christian directors in hopes they can recapture that Jesus mojo. Evan director Tom Shadyac, a Catholic whose previous God film Bruce Almighty grossed $500 million, recently told Newsday, "There's no bigger Jesus freak in this room than me, 'cause when I was as young as I can remember, having cognition and thought, I was looking at this Jesus guy and going, 'Whoever this is, this is somebody that's blowing my mind.' "

Universal has hired a religious marketing firm to sell Evan Almighty to churches and religious leaders, hoping to capture the same hundreds of millions in Christ dollars raked in by The Passion, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Bruce Almighty. If they succeed, it will be tragic, not because Evan Almighty is unfunny (although it certainly is), but because it will validate Hollywood's embarrassingly stupid approach to religion and faith. If I were a believing man, movies like Evan would make me long for the days when Hollywood just ignored God.

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Posted by B Feiler at 7:00 AM 2 comments

Skip the Flood
Thursday, June 21, 2007

The reviews are atrocious and some friends in Hollywood went to a preview and found it incomprehensible. "Should have stuck closer to the source material," they sent via Blackberry after asking for a primer on Noah. But the press can't avoid linking Evan Almighty to supposed finding God in Hollywood. Yawn.

In Hollywood, long considered an encampment of liberal-minded showbiz sinners, God has found an ally in director Tom Shadyac, whose big-budget comedy "Evan Almighty" debuts in movie theaters Friday.

And watch out, Washington, D.C., Shadyac and his movie are headed your way, too.

Throughout its history, Hollywood has made popular biblical movies, such as 1956's "The Ten Commandments" about Moses leading the Jews from Egypt. But the studios often are criticized by religious and conservative groups for pushing the boundaries of good taste and morality in mainstream movies.

In "Evan Almighty," those groups likely have nothing to fear. The politicians in Washington, however, catch plenty of flak about honesty, faith and protecting the environment.

"There is no more a Jesus freak in this room than me," the director of the biblical comedy told reporters recently.

"When I was as young as I can remember -- having cognition and thought -- I was looking at that Jesus guy, going,'Whoever this is, this is somebody that is blowing my mind."'

"Evan Almighty" modernizes the tale of Noah's Ark and the biblical flood that destroyed all of humanity except for God's chosen, Noah, his family members and the animals he loaded two-by-two onto his hand-built ark.

The film is a follow-up to Shadyac's 2003, $485 million global box office smash "Bruce Almighty," which starred Jim Carrey as a TV reporter to whom God grants his almighty power only for Bruce to learn it's not so easy being God.

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Posted by B Feiler at 7:00 AM 0 comments

Gore: The New Gideon
Thursday, May 3, 2007

What about the CAKE BIBLE or the BARBECUE BIBLE or any of the other books like that I see in the bookstore?

Visitors to the Gaia Napa Valley Hotel and Spa won't find the Gideon Bible in the nightstand drawer. Instead, on the bureau will be a copy of ``An Inconvenient Truth,'' former Vice President Al Gore's book about global warming.

They'll also find the Gaia equipped with waterless urinals, solar lighting and recycled paper as it marches toward becoming California's first hotel certified as ``green,'' or benevolent to the environment. Similar features are found 35 miles south at San Francisco's Orchard Garden Hotel, which competes for customers with neighboring luxury hotels like the Ritz-Carlton and Fairmont.

``I'm not your traditional Birkenstocks and granola type of guy,'' said Stefan Muehle, general manager of the Orchard Garden, who said green measures are reducing energy costs as much as 25 percent a month. ``We're trying to dispel the myth that being green and being luxurious are mutually exclusive.''

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Posted by B Feiler at 8:01 AM 0 comments

Noah's Arc
Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Even the arthouses are going biblical these days.

In the Romanian mountain resort of Sinaia, two hours north-west of Bucharest, the film-maker Darren Aronofsky is contemplating the extinction of mankind. An extreme response, you might think, to a few uncomprehending reviews of his last movie, the ecological science-fiction fantasy The Fountain. After all, it has as many passionate fans as it does sniggering detractors; it's that sort of film. But the 38-year-old Aronofsky isn't in Romania to escape anything. He is accompanying his fiancee, the actress Rachel Weisz, who is here shooting a movie. And his thoughts have turned to the demise of civilisation because he is several drafts into a screenplay about Noah. I hear the narrative has an impressive arc.

Aronofsky and Noah go way back. When the writer-director was 13, he won a United Nations competition at his school in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn; it was for his first poem, a little effort about the end of the world as seen through Noah's eyes. "That story has interested me ever since," he says, squinting through his yellow-tinted shades and pulling a striped woolly hat on to his head. We are on the decking in front of his hotel, with the snow-dusted mountains spread out before us. Henry, Aronofsky and Weisz's 10-month-old son has just been whisked off on a sightseeing trip with his nanny, and all is tranquil.

The script, Aronofsky tells me, is no conventional biblical epic. "Noah was the first person to plant vineyards and drink wine and get drunk," he says admiringly. "It's there in the Bible - it was one of the first things he did when he reached land. There was some real survivor's guilt going on there. He's a dark, complicated character."

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Posted by B Feiler at 8:00 AM 0 comments

Where Is Devil Idol When You Need It?
Thursday, April 19, 2007

Samuel Jackson as God. Jim Caviezel as Jesus. Charlton Heston as Moses. These are just a few Hollywood stars who've played characters from the Bible. But who should play the Devil? You'd think it would be easy (what about Al Pacino from a few years ago), but it's not.

Finding the perfect Jesus was no problem for Carl Amari — he just called up Jim Caviezel, who starred in "The Passion of the Christ" — but making a deal with just the right devil has turned out to be harder than hell.

"And you need a good Satan," Amari said with a bit of exasperation, "because Satan has some of the best lines in the Bible."

Amari is a 43-year-old Chicago entrepreneur who made a fortune in the late 1980s by salvaging old-time radio shows and repackaging them on cassette tapes. Now Amari sees a golden opportunity in giving the family Bible a serious digital upgrade — he's behind "The Word of Promise," a lavishly produced, word-for-word dramatic reading of the Bible by Caviezel and other Hollywood stars that, when it's completed, will fill 70 CDs.

The first part of the project, a 20-CD set of the New Testament for $49.95, will arrive in stores in October. Considering the proven potency of both the audio-book marketplace and Christian retail, it might be a holiday-gift sensation. The presence of Caviezel should give it instant cachet in many Christian circles; the 100-person cast also includes Terence Stamp as God, Michael York as the narrator, Luke Perry as Judas and Marisa Tomei as Mary Magdalene. The recording sessions began in July, but, to the consternation of Amari and director JoBe Cerny, the role of Satan is still up in the air.

"We're still experimenting," Cerny said Tuesday from the studio in Chicago. "We have some ideas and someone in mind, but nothing is for sure yet. It's a challenge because it needs to sound really devious and seductive and, uh, you know, devilish. But you don't want to be too over-the-top."
One of the people they rejected apparently was Simon Cowell.

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Posted by B Feiler at 8:05 AM 1 comments

Why the Pope Hates Bob Dylan
Sunday, March 11, 2007

Just Because Bono is becoming part of the Episcopal church service, don't expect the same of Bob Dylan. Word this week that Pope Benedict tried to stop Bob Dylan playing for the late John Paul II in 1997, because he feared the musician was a "prophet" whose beliefs were at odds with the Roman Catholic Church.

In a new book of memoirs about his predecessor, the Pope recalls the events of the World Eucharist Congress at Bologna in 1997, a gathering of 300,000 young Catholic pilgrims who were to be exposed to the singer's iconoclastic songs and their "completely different" message, reports the Telegraph.

Pope Benedict wrote: "The Pope appeared tired, exhausted. At that very moment the stars arrived, Bob Dylan and others whose names I do not remember.

''They had a completely different message from the one which the Pope had.

"There was reason to be sceptical - I was, and in some ways I still am - over whether it was really right to allow this type of 'prophet' to appear."

Pope Benedict is known to have a strong dislike of popular music.

Last year, he cancelled the Vatican's Christmas fundraising concert and banned guitars from Mass.Six years ago he labelled rock and pop music "anti-Christian".

At the event in Bologna, Dylan performed four songs, including Knockin' on Heaven's Door, A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall and Blowin' in the Wind.

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Posted by B Feiler at 8:03 AM 0 comments

"I May Be the Only Person on the Face of the Earth Who Loves the Smell of Dung"
Thursday, February 22, 2007

When I was in the circus, a priest came to the lot on the opening day in Deland, blessed the tent, and held a service for all the performers. Periodically during the year, a chaplain would pitch up on the lot and sort of hang around. Maybe there would be a service, nothing major. The far more noticeable religious activity was the competition among two different evangelical pentecostal Bible study groups to recruit different members. One was started by the family of wire walkers, the other by a branch of the trapeze artists. I attended one of these, complete with tongues, and the scene is described in UNDER THE BIG TOP.

I was thinking about this today when my brother sent me an article from that Atlanta Journal-Constitution about a circus chaplain. (The author, John Blake, wrote a wonderful piece about me a few years ago, calling me "a modern-day Indiana Jones.") Says retired priest Newell Graham, who has seen The Greatest Show on Earth 26 times, "I may be the only person on the face of this Earth that loves the smell of dung."

The current chaplain, the Rev. Jerry Hogan,travels at least 60,000 miles annually, performing baptisms, first communions, weddings and funerals.

"You see people take their gifts to extraordinary levels," Hogan says, "and it reassures your faith, whatever that may be, that there is something more to life than what we readily experience."

Hogan is assisted by two Roman Catholic nuns who not only travel with the circus, but also help put the shows on. Sister Dorothy Fabritze criss-crosses the country with Ringling in a truck that hauls a chapel. She pulls the show's curtains, steering the entrance and exit of each act.

The constant travels remind her of biblical journeys: Abraham moving to a new land; Moses leading his people out of Egypt.

"They've taught me a lot about leaving from one place to another, letting go and trust," Fabritze says. "A trapeze artist has to have a lot of trust. The performers are trusting the crew to get things in the right place in the right time. So there's a lot of family values, a lot of trust in what we do and that's, of course, scriptural and spiritual."

Graham says he admires the efficiency of the circus so much that he's driven to towns just to watch the crew unpack railroad cars. It puts him off when people refer to a chaotic situation as a "circus."

"Trust me. There is absolutely nothing chaotic about the circus, in front of the footlights or behind the footlights," he says. "If many churches worked as smoothly as the circus, they would be spiritual powerhouses."

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Posted by B Feiler at 7:00 AM 0 comments

Bob Dylan (Hearts) Israel
Thursday, February 15, 2007

It's Bob Dylan week here on Feiler Faster. First, Dylan's song about Abraham pitches up on an NPR show about my book. Then a friend sends along this email about Dylan's love that dare not speak its name: His love for Israel.

Back in 1983 Bob Dylan wrote "Neighborhood Bully" and sang it on an album entitled "Infidels". "Neighberhood Bully" is an amazing pro Israel song, a commentary on the Jewish people and its contribution to the world; on the eternity of the Jewish people; on the world's hypocrisy; as well as the persistence of anti-Semitism over the centuries.

Unfortunately very few people seemed to notice it at the time but its never been more appropriate than it is today. I recently shared it with a colleague (and dedicated Dylan fan!) who confessed that he had missed it as well. So for the edification of all of us who remain Dylan fans, for all of us who love Israel and hate the world's hypocrisy, I'm reprinting the lyrics below. Read it and share it with your kids ....download the song from itunes (it's actually a great song...well worth the $.99!)...

Here's a sample:

Neighborhood Bully
by Bob Dylan

Well, the neighborhood bully, he's just one man,
His enemies say he's on their land.
They got him outnumbered about a million to one,
He got no place to escape to, no place to run.
He's the neighborhood bully.

The neighborhood bully just lives to survive,
He's criticized and condemned for being alive.
He's not supposed to fight back, he's supposed to have thick skin,
He's supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in.
He's the neighborhood bully.

The neighborhood bully been driven out of every land,
He's wandered the earth an exiled man.
Seen his family scattered, his people hounded and torn,
He's always on trial for just being born.
He's the neighborhood bully.

Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized,
Old women condemned him, said he should apologize.
Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad.
The bombs were meant for him.
He was supposed to feel bad.
He's the neighborhood bully.

From the album "Infidels", Copyright © 1983 Special Rider Music

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Posted by B Feiler at 7:05 AM 1 comments

Rickie Lee Jones, the New Cat Stevens
Tuesday, February 6, 2007

What's with rock stars and conversions? First Garth Brooks, then Bono. Now Rickie Lee Jones. The NYT reports on the new album by Rickie Lee Jones, "The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard," which is based in part around the words of Jesus.

“Whatever it is Christ said doesn’t get a fair shake,” Rickie Lee Jones said. On a rainy December day, she was sniffling and coughing, fighting a bad cold and losing. “There’s not much written, it was done 150 years later, and it was used to create an empire. So can we get rid of all that and just see what the guy said?”

Ms. Jones was explaining the premise behind her new album, “The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard,” out today on New West Records. The project is an attempt to explore the words and ideas of Jesus in a contemporary context, backed by the most rocked-up music of her almost-30-year career.

In a taping at Sirius Satellite Radio immediately before Ms. Jones’s interview, the intensity of her relationship to this material was evident. With eyes closed, shoes off and raggedy socks rolled down to her ankles, Ms. Jones sang, gesticulated, directed and cajoled her four-piece band. She started the session crouched in a three-point stance — one fist on the floor, the other clutching a microphone — and proceeded to pace and stalk around the tiny studio, fully possessed by the music.

“Sermon” began in 2005 when Robert Lee Cantelon, a close friend of Ms. Jones’s, organized a recording of various people reading from his book “The Words,” a new translation of everything actually attributed to Jesus in the Bible, published in 1991. When it came time for her to read, she began to sing instead, improvising a complete song; that first, spontaneous take is “Nobody Knows My Name,” the album’s opening track.

The cutting out of Jesus' words sounds a lot like Jefferson's Bible.

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Posted by B Feiler at 12:00 PM 0 comments

God at Sundance
Sunday, January 21, 2007

Having just spent a week in Hollywood, I know firsthand that religion is still an active topic in the entertainment industry. The projects seems to follow the model one sees on the bestseller lists these days: Pro or con. Meaning they are either going after the population that is interested in religion, usually in a way that Hollywood perceives is reverential, like the recent film on "The Nativity", or they are attacking religion, often by portraying religious conservatives as hypocritical, like the recent documentary "Jesus Camp." The pro or con framework is tired and largely reflects the bias of the media. It fails to capture the much more interesting things going on in the middle, where faith and doubt, church and state, mingle in more complicated and fascinating ways.


Still, it continues, as this week's Sundance Film Festival illustrate. A piece in the Salt Lake Tribune today captures the headlines:
Opening Sunday night at the Sundance Film Festival is Karslake's "For the Bible Tells Me So," a documentary in the independent film competition. The production, which took more than three years to complete, was funded in large part by Orem-resident Bruce Bastian, co-creator of the word-processing software that became WordPerfect. The film shows how the Bible's verses have been used to justify, over centuries, various forms of discrimination, and how today religious conservatives use the Good Book to back anti-gay rhetoric.

For gay and lesbian people who grew up steeped in Scripture and tied to church communities, this rhetoric - something referred to in the film as "a modern invention" - has been especially painful. Not just for them, but for their families.

The piece goes on to list the other films vying for attention and distribution at Sundance.

"Save Me" -- Scott, a young gay man living the wild life, is checked into a Christian "ex-gay" ministry where he and his mentor, Mark, become torn between their feelings for one another and threats of damnation.

"The Island" (Russia) -- A Russian barge worker, left for dead by Germans during World War II, is rescued by monks and 30 years later still lives at the monastery as a hermit. His antics and questionable sanity disturb the monks, but locals trust in his healing powers and believe he can see the future.

"The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun" (Denmark) -- Mr. Vig, an 82-year-old virgin living alone in rundown castle, partners up with a headstrong nun to fulfill his dream of turning his home into a Russian Orthodox monastery.

"On a Tightrope" (Norway/Canada) -- The Uighur people, China's largest Muslim minority, live under Chinese government control. Four Uighur orphans try to learn an ancient tightrope walking tradition, a metaphor for the Uighur people's struggles.

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Posted by B Feiler at 9:08 AM 0 comments

Angels Not Tough Enough
Friday, January 5, 2007

A Friday afternoon smile: Meredith College, a women's college in North Carolina, has decided to drop its century-old nickname, The Angels, because it's "not tough enough!" As the school's athletic information director told the Charlotte Observer: "What are you going to say? 'Kill 'em, Angels?'"

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Posted by B Feiler at 6:16 PM 0 comments

Indiana Jones and Noah's Ark
Monday, January 1, 2007

I've spent quite a lot of time in recent years both trekking up Mt. Ararat in eastern Turkey, reading about all the people, from Czar Nicholas to astronauts to photographers on Air Force One, who claim to have found Noah's Ark, to the endless number of websites that track the hunt. In the course of that time, I once stumbled onto a "real actual script" that purported to be the fourth installment of the Indiana Jones series, in which he races to find the ark. Makes sense. I flipped through the script online, then thought little about it.

Suddenly, today, Steven Spielberg confirmed that he will begin shooting the fourth episode this year, for release in 2008. No word on topic. Within minutes, the blogosphere erupted with speculation about the topic, and a movie buff in the UK has provided the backstory to the script I saw.

In the spring of 1995, Last Crusade screenwriter Jeffrey Boam privately admitted to having been asked to write a script, with subsequent rumours suggesting that the story concerned an attempt to foil a Soviet plot to establish a missile base on the moon, or had something to do with the UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico - or both. Then on May 29, 1996, a script entitled Indiana Jones And The Sons Of Darkness, credited to Boam (from a story by George Lucas), was posted on the internet by someone who claimed to have lifted it from Lucasfilm's offices. The script, which concerned a race by Indy to beat the Russians to the remnants of Noah's Ark, was removed fro the web a day after its initial posting, fuelling rumours that it was genuine. But four months and several cease-and-desist notices later, ambitious Indy fan, Robert Smith 'fessed up to having written the bogus script. "I was paid the ultimate compliment by those fans who believed the script was the real McCoy," he said later. Smith's confession didn't stop the ever-reliable Daily Mail from reporting that Sons Of Darkness was going ahead, with Kevin Costner as Indy's 'bad seed' brother.

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Posted by B Feiler at 9:25 PM 0 comments

Any Dream Will Do
Friday, December 22, 2006

It's probably the best written story in the Bible, though not the best written show in Broadway history. Now, Andrew Lloyd Weber has announced a new reality show, "Any Dream Will do," on the BBC, designed to cast the next Joseph to star in a London revival of "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat." [At right the original Broadway poster.]

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Posted by B Feiler at 12:04 AM 0 comments

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