Fr. Hans

The Lion in Winter: Why ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’ is Winning Over America

How did a movie about crusaders, a sacrificial lion and talking beavers gross $67 million in its opening weekend? The not-so-unlikely marriage of Hollywood and C.S. Lewis.

By John Zmirak

What did you do this past weekend? I spent part of mine in a Times Square theater full of adult Manhattanites at a movie with talking beavers. And a perky 8-year-old English girl with crooked teeth. And a cute widdle goat boy named Tumnus. No hunks on screen, no babes, and nary a kiss. The only “hot” woman in the movie was a six-foot-plus satanic witch with blonde dredlocks, and a kinky habit of torturing centaurs. The film’s stars were teens and children, but there wasn’t one kid in the audience. Nor were these moviegoers bused in from some Evangelical church—there were too many women wearing black, holding hands with Nader voters. I wondered aloud if this was a bunch of stoners—but sniffed around in vain for a whiff of the banished herb. Nobody snorted at the moments of outright Christian allegory, or scoffed at the galloping satyrs. Only one person even got up to go to the bathroom. These urbanites sat, spellbound, for more than two hours, some with tears on their cheeks, and at the end they burst into applause. At last I had to face the fact: New Yorkers are into Narnia.

So are Americans: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe made $67 million in its opening weekend, covering almost half its costs, and received glowing reviews from most major papers, including the Logos-phobic New York Times. (Only the lowbrow New York Post and drab suburban Newsday disagreed.) Ladies and gentlemen, what we have here is a hit—and the prospect of six more Narnia movies, to compete with the Harry Potter franchise and drive C.S. Lewis all the way up the bestseller lists. Look for Lewis sections to spring up in the bookstores, crowding up against the Tolkien shelves, in a veritable onslaught of Oxford Christian whimsy. It helps that so many of the writers who review the movies grew up on the Narnia books, and still remember fondly the moments of imaginative epiphany they provoked.

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Pope attacks “culture of death” at first baptisms

Reuters Crispian Balmer Sun Jan 8, 2006 9:40 AM ET172

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Benedict performed the first baptisms of his pontificate on Sunday, using the occasion to launch an impassioned denunciation of irresponsible sex and a “culture of death” that he said pervaded the modern world.

Pope Benedict, abandoning his prepared sermon, compared the wild excesses of the ancient Roman empire to 21st century society and urged people to rediscover their faith.

“In our times we need to say ‘no’ to the largely dominant culture of death,” Benedict said during his improvised homily in the frescoed Sistine Chapel where he was elected Pope last April.

“(There is) an anti-culture demonstrated by the flight to drugs, by the flight from reality, by illusions, by false happiness … displayed in sexuality which has become pure pleasure devoid of responsibility,” he added.

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Saddam’s Terror Training Camps

What the documents captured from the former Iraqi regime reveal–and why they should all be made public.
by Stephen F. Hayes
01/16/2006, Volume 011, Issue 17

THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.

The secret training took place primarily at three camps–in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak–and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria’s GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis. According to three officials with knowledge of the intelligence on Iraqi training camps, White House and National Security Council officials were briefed on these findings in May 2005; senior Defense Department officials subsequently received the same briefing.

The photographs and documents on Iraqi training camps come from a collection of some 2 million “exploitable items” captured in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. They include handwritten notes, typed documents, audiotapes, videotapes, compact discs, floppy discs, and computer hard drives. Taken together, this collection could give U.S. intelligence officials and policymakers an inside look at the activities of the former Iraqi regime in the months and years before the Iraq war.
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Materialistic Moral Compasses

American Vision Eric Rauch

Liberal politics is at a crossroads. Humanism is being attacked by way of the Intelligent Design movement. If biological Darwinism can be shown to be nothing more than a philosophy that gives meaning to the facts, then, by implication, humanists are left in the lake without a paddle. The Darwinists hold fast to their “first principles” as tenaciously as most Christians, and yet we are the ones who get ridiculed for having a “silly, wishful-thinking faith.” Two recent articles by British authors exemplify this point forcefully.

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Soul Man: Leon Kass sounds a warning about the perils of biotechnology

Wall Street Opinion Journal BRET STEPHENS Saturday, January 7, 2006

WASHINGTON–Leon Kass is willing–reluctantly willing–to indulge a request. I have asked him to refresh our interview of several weeks ago by reflecting on the case of Hwang Woo Suk, the internationally celebrated South Korean researcher who recently admitted to fabricating cloned stem cells. Dr. Kass thinks that a decennial White House conference on aging might make for an equally timely news peg. Health and longevity; dementia and death; euthanasia and living wills; performance enhancement and life-prolonging genetic manipulations–these are the subjects that really engage the mind of this 66-year-old physician and ethicist (and former philosophy professor of mine). As for embryos, stem cells, cloning and the uses and abuses thereof, they are “not the most profound of subjects,” he told me over a pot of tea in the kitchen of his Washington apartment. “The embryo question is really about the means. The real question has to do with the ends to which we put this.”

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Patriach Bartholomew in Tarpon Springs

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew is in Tarpon Springs, Florida for the feast day of Epiphany this week. I was up there yesterday for a welcoming Doxology at St. Nicholas Cathedral, the church in Tarpon. He will lead liturgy tomorrow, throw the cross into Spring Bayou during the blessing of the waters, and make the usuals rounds of meetings, banquets, etc. that accompany these visits.

Some of the events will be televised: Patriachal visit.

Nearer, My God, to the G.O.P.

Ed: From NYT – can’t find online copy.

New York Times JOSEPH LOCONTE January 2, 2006

WASHINGTON

NANCY PELOSI, the Democratic leader in the House, sounded like an Old Testament prophet recently when she denounced the Republican budget for its “injustice and immorality” and urged her colleagues to cast their no votes “as an act of worship” during this religious season.

This, apparently, is what the Democrats had in mind when they vowed after President Bush’s re-election to reclaim religious voters for their party. In the House, they set up a Democratic Faith Working Group. Senator Harry Reid, the minority leader, created a Web site called Word to the Faithful. And Democratic officials began holding conferences with religious progressives. All of this was with the intention of learning how to link faith with public policy. An event for liberal politicians and advocates at the University of California at Berkeley in July even offered a seminar titled “I Don’t Believe in God, but I Know America Needs a Spiritual Left.”

A look at the tactics and theology of the religious left, however, suggests that this is exactly what American politics does not need. If Democrats give religious progressives a stronger voice, they’ll only replicate the misdeeds of the religious right.

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Counting Castro’s Victims

Article available for seven days only.
Wall Street Journal MARY ANASTASIA O’GRADY December 30, 2005

“On May 27, [1966,] 166 Cubans — civilians and members of the military — were executed and submitted to medical procedures of blood extraction of an average of seven pints per person. This blood is sold to Communist Vietnam at a rate of $50 per pint with the dual purpose of obtaining hard currency and contributing to the Vietcong Communist aggression.

“A pint of blood is equivalent to half a liter. Extracting this amount of blood from a person sentenced to death produces cerebral anemia and a state of unconsciousness and paralysis. Once the blood is extracted, the person is taken by two militiamen on a stretcher to the location where the execution takes place.”

— InterAmerican Human Rights Commission, April 7, 1967
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New Orthodox bishop sets his goals

By Rich Barlow | December 31, 2005

Bishop Nikon Liolin wears several miters. He had been archbishop for the Albanian Orthodox Archdiocese. Then earlier this month, the Southbridge resident was enthroned as bishop of New England for the Orthodox Church in America, which counts several ethnic Orthodox parishes as members and has its regional headquarters in Boston. Both elevations were milestones: The diocese of New England had been without a bishop for 13 years, the Albanian archdiocese for 23 years, he says. Liolin attributes the lengthy vacancies to a shortage of candidates because bishops are banned from marriage. (Liolin is a widower.)

It has been almost a millennium since Eastern Christian churches split from Western ones (today, the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches) over doctrine. ”All of the faiths are under attack by some of society’s changing morals and mores,” the new bishop says. ”And the churches and the faiths have to be bastions of morality. . . . There is a moral stance that God has revealed to us.” Excerpts from a recent interview follow.
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Q: Your goal is to increase converts?

A: To increase the number of converts to the church by having more visibility. Without a resident bishop, that made it difficult, because pastors had to work on their own without the on-site direction of a resident hierarch.
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Q: Why should [people] consider being an Orthodox Christian?

A: We want to begin with a relationship with God, a relationship with Christ. When I’m talking about outreach, I’m not talking about trying to reach people that are churched. Many people in the United States attend churches; however, there are more unchurched in the United States than there are churched. So we’re trying to reach people that really have no relationship with God, do not have any faith. The Orthodox do not proselytize for those who already have a Christian base.

Yes, there was a separation between the east and the west churches. However, there are continually dialogues to see how we can come closer. A few years ago, it was an Orthodox priest who was president of the World Council of Churches.
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