December 27, 2005

The seven books of C. S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicle, which sell 6 million copies annually, are being filmed by Walden Media, a subsidiary of Walt Disney Pictures. Disney has spent $150 million (plus millions more for advertising) on the first episode, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the much-beloved story of the four Pevensie siblings, who are sent out of London during the Blitz to live with a Lewis-resembling professor.

Conventional wisdom has it that the Democrats don’t know how to talk about faith. Religion is a Republican and conservative thing, not something that liberals and progressives feel comfortable discussing. Democrats like Jimmy Carter are exceptions that prove the rule.

As many as 25,000 of the 35,000 people who lived in the city of Balakot died in the earthquake that hit northern Pakistan and India-controlled Kashmir in October. Bibi Rahiba lost her husband, one brother, and three of her five children. Weeks after the quake, she has made little progress in finding the bodies of her children. But she steadily chips away at the rubble. At night she sleeps in a tent perched over the ruins of what were once two- and three-story homes. As snow starts to fall and the Himalayan winter descends, the town is a cemetery.

With advanced degrees in theology and the philosophy of science, Nancey Murphy has specialized in the relationship between Christian thought and scientific knowledge. Her book Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning (1990) won the American Academy of Religion award for excellence and a Templeton Prize as an outstanding book in science and theology. Her other books include Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism (1996) and (with George F. R. Ellis) On the Moral Nature of the Universe: Theology, Cosmology, and Ethics (1996).