Features
Good and terrible: The God of Narnia
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.
Can Democrats get religion? Left and center in Grand Rapids: Left and center in Grand Rapids
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.
Agony in Pakistan: After the quake
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.
Nature's God: Nancey Murphy on religion and science
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).
Creator God: The debate on intelligent design
Man in black
Director Sidney Lumet once lampooned the “rubber ducky” school of drama: “Someone once took his rubber ducky away from him, and that’s why he’s a deranged killer.” In telling the story of singer Johnny Cash and his tumultuous reckoning with fame—including a first marriage that crashed in divorce (though a union that produced Rosanne Cash can hardly be characterized a failure); an addiction to pills; and his courtship of June Carter of country music’s legendary Carter family—Walk the Line presents Cash’s volcanic father as the rubber ducky.
The life force
When two violent criminals show up at Tom Stall’s diner, he is forced to take action. He overcomes the assailants, obtains their gun and kills them. Widespread news coverage tells the story of this peaceful family man who halted the killers and their spree of violence.
Books
Performing the text
Departments
A good cry: A child is born!
Closed on Sunday: Celebrating Christmas with the family
Name-dropping: Errors in appellation
Christmas wrappings: A time for holy foolishness
News
Century Marks
“When I went to Washington as the pope’s envoy just before the outbreak of the [Iraq] war, [President Bush] told me, ‘Don’t worry, your eminence. We’ll be quick and do well in Iraq.’ Unfortunately, the facts have demonstrated afterward that things took a different course—not rapid and not favorable. Bush was wrong.”
—Retired Cardinal Pio Laghi, recalling a conversation with President Bush on March 5, 2003