Posted on 03/18/2004 9:56:22 AM PST by Stone Mountain
Me too, they've been mediocre for so long it really doesn't concern me anymore how bad they are. I'm rooting against them so that change can happen.
Bad football? Could it be a chastisement from God? Maybe.
I think so, the Brother's of Holy Cross sold their souls a long time ago. Its no longer for the Catholic poor, its an Ivy League Wannabe.
Depictions of Jesus that claim to represent the historical Jesus of Nazareth, but that minimize his Jewishness by an exaggerated separation from his ethnic-religious context cannot be called Christian.
Well, darn. Out goes all that Renaissance religious artwork. daVinci's Last Supper doesn't look very Jewish either. Darn anit-Christian bigot! In fact, out goes darn near every piece of Christian art before the very modern era.
Unless of course, we treat this comment with the seriousness it deserves. Like an ill-considered rant, intended only to club Gibson, which accidentally smashes up the Church itself as he starts swinging it. Oops.
The movie sets Jesus against Jews by way of appeal to stereotypical depictions of Jews, whether in the form of an appalling fade-out/fade-in shot from a profile of the apostle Peter's hooked nose...
Um... Peter? Mr. Beaudoin, you really need to finish that Bible. It carries on beyond what you see in the movie. Peter turns out a little differently than you seem to think he does. "Evil Jew" is perhaps not the most appropriate characterization.
Depictions of Jesus that treat his suffering as the singular triumph of a spiritual hero cannot be called Christian. Christian faith holds that Jesus experienced the same banality of evil and terror that many political prisoners of his day underwent, and that in this way God shared humanly in the unjust sufferings experienced in everyday human life.
It just wouldn't be the National Catholic Reporter if it didn't flirt with heresy. And it wouldn't be our friend Tom if it didn't contradict the facts.
He is not an action hero like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Mel Gibson himself, but, paradoxically, a heroic action antihero. Jesus takes center stage as action hero by being the drenched center of excessive violence. Although Jesus does not physically fight back (despite a brief demonstration that he can take it like a man by picking himself up during his scourging), he becomes the heroic antihero by out-divining everyone else. He is beaten to a pulp, but no one can possibly match him in terms of his divinity.
Let's try to translate by matching the intellectual coherence with more suitable prose. "He's an action hero. But not, like, because he takes any action or anything. It's because he's all, like, divine and stuff. And who else can match that?! Not that he uses it to do anything, but he SOOO could, and he KNOWS we can tell. And that's just annoying and stuff."
...most oddly of all, the devil taunts Jesus at the beginning by saying that no one has it within him to take on the iniquity of the world and save all souls -- addressing Jesus from the start as a superhuman being, as an action hero in the making.
Or maybe like he knows He's God? Nahhhh.... Must be the action hero thing!
His Christ could only ascend to this heroic action antihero status in a culture where we neither encounter nor take responsibility for our own violence. If we Americans regularly saw, for example, the bloodied corpses of Iraqi women and children, or American soldiers? mangled bodies in the papers and on television, this film would not have the same shocking and exclusivizing hold on our imaginations that it does. Brutal physical violence would be more immediately connected to real pain, to authentic devastation, and to our own complicit tolerance for a faraway war on the condition that we are not drafted and are not told how much of our tax money pays for each Iraqi civilian death.
Come on Tom. We GET IT. You're a liberal. Shut up and sing for your supper.
...The Passion also over-individualizes the Christian message by portraying violence against Jesus himself as a central concern of Christian faith, separating this violence from violence in our own lives today
Tom wanted flash forwards from the flogging scene, to the time Tom himself messed up his Tivo settings, and missed last week's "Tru Calling." Oh the suffering!
At the showing I attended in Boston, people were eating popcorn, drinking Cokes and Icees, and eating pretzels, while we all sat in comfortable cushioned reclining chairs during the mayhem.
Good Lord! Eating popcorn?! Drinking Cokes?! in comfortable chairs?!! Where on earth did those people think they were?! They were acting like it was a movie or something!
For these reasons, The Passion cannot be called a Christian film.
If that's all you've got, Tom, I think the better conclusion would be "For these reasons, Tom Beaudoin can not be called someone who has a clue what he's talking about."
It is anti-Christian insofar as the overfixation on violence against Jesus provides a dramatic and persuasive escape hatch from the more complicated and demanding witness of the Gospels: that a man whose intimacy with God reverberated through changed relationships that threatened the religious and political powers of his day, and that our own intimacy with God may demand no less.
Tom doesn't know about a thing called "irony." Otherwise he would never have included this line in an article where he lined up with the religious and political powers of his own time to castigate Gibson for holding true to his faith.
If the movie is used as an escape from this Gospel demand, we may well imagine that Jesus is sitting with his popcorn and Coke, watching the movie next to us, crying like so many of us in the theater, but for a different reason, as he silently says, ?Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.?
Again with the popcorn and Coke. I'm trying to understand what significance he seems to think he's establishing there by being alarmed at seeing these things at a movie theatre.
Other than that, this concluding sentence is the emptiest piece of melodrama I can recall. Tom, you didn't make a coherent case. We have no idea why Jesus is crying in the theater in your little scene. We're guessing he wanted a Pepsi or maybe some Raininettes (Incidentally, when did theatres stop carrying Raisinettes? I never see them anymore, and they're WAY better than Ju-Ju-Bees. Anyway.. that's an aside). Or maybe Jesus is crying in his theater because, you know, taking on the suffering of all mankind might be just a tad more painful than the suffering every Christian actually takes on everyday in Tom's world.
Tom Beaudoin is visiting assistant professor of theology at Boston College
By the grace of God, his visit will be short. That place is screwed up enough as it is.
I know that 'ivory tower' is a common phrase... but I do like to reserve Tower of Ivory (Turris eburnea) as a title for Mary :)
He just couldn't take it anymore.
Room and board at BC is at almost 40K per year. What a waste.
Ardara, did you mean to write National Catholic Reporter or had you intended to write the alternative conservative National Catholic Register?
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