Author: Lee M.

Titian, Annunciation, 1559-62

Since I missed this yesterday, I’ll just link to Brandon’s fine post on the topic.

You have to hand it to Mel Gibson, he does his own thing. Here’s a look at his new project Apocalypto an “action epic about the ancient Maya” featuring “[h]undreds of local extras–many of whom have never seen a movie, let alone acted in one” and filmed in – yes – a language most viewers will never have even heard, much less understand.

Apocalypto, which Gibson loosely translates from the Greek as “a new beginning,” was inspired in large part by his work with the Mirador Basin Project, an effort to preserve a large swath of the Guatemalan rain forest and its Maya ruins. Gibson and his rookie cowriter on Apocalypto, Farhad Safinia, were captivated by the ancient Maya, one of the hemisphere’s first great civilizations, which reached its zenith about A.D. 600 in southern Mexico and northern Guatemala. The two began poring over Maya myths of creation and destruction, including the Popol Vuh, and research suggesting that ecological abuse and war-mongering were major contributors to the Maya’s sudden collapse, some 500 years before Europeans arrived in the Americas.

Those apocalyptic strains haunt Apocalypto, which takes place in an opulent but decaying Maya kingdom, whose leaders insist that if the gods are not appeased by more temples and human sacrifices, the crops will die. But the writers hope that the larger themes of decline will be a wake-up call. “The parallels between the environmental imbalance and corruption of values that doomed the Maya and what’s happening to our own civilization are eerie,” says Safinia. Gibson, who insists ideology matters less to him than stories of “penitential hardship” like his Oscar-winning Braveheart, puts it more bluntly: “The fearmongering we depict in this film reminds me a little of President Bush and his guys.”

Hmm – potshots at President Bush, saving the rainforest – I thought Mel was supposed to be Hollywood’s resident right-winger?

Anyway, I for one thought Gibson’s The Passion was an impressive and moving (though flawed) piece of work. I’m looking forward to this new flick.

Rosanne Cash talks about getting angry letters for her opposition to the Iraq war:

Through songs such as “Like Fugitives” and “World Without Sound” — which asks, “Who do I believe/Once they put you in the ground?” — Cash lets loose on the difficulties of having to share her grief with the public. “There are some fans of my dad’s who have this sense of territorialism about him,” says Cash. “I had a guy come up to me and say, ‘Do you love your father?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘No. I love your father!’ It borders on the psychotic, I’m telling you.”

Compounding the problem was her public opposition to the war in Iraq, which angered many of her father’s admirers. “I got so much hate mail,” Cash says. “Invariably, they would say, ‘Your father’s a real American, and you should go sleep with Sadaam.’” Ironically, Johnny Cash himself was adamantly against the war. “It broke his heart, it really did,” she asserts, claiming that her father was “addicted” to war coverage on CNN during his last months. “We talked about it in every single conversation we had,” she says. “He was almost a Quaker in his pacifism. He thought there was never a reason for war — and he had felt that way, he told me, since the Vietnam War.”

(Via Reason)

There are a couple of good items in the April issue of First Things (not yet online) concerning intelligent design that I wanted to highlight.

First, Fr. Edward T. Oakes has a letter responding to Christoph Cardinal Schönborn’s article from January. Fr. Oakes makes the very important point that one concedes way too much in advance to atheist Darwinians by allowing that Darwinism is incompatible with theism. Most importantly, it’s just not true (and I agree with Fr. Oakes there). Secondly, it’s not especially smart for Christians to put all their eggs in the ID basket. Even if proponents of ID are correct in pointing out lacunae in evolutionary theory, there’s no guarantee that those shortcomings won’t end up being filled out in a purely naturalistic way. To think otherwise risks falling into a bad “god of the gaps” kind of reasoning. It’s better for Christians to engage people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett on philosophical grounds where they’re vulnerable in their inference that Darwinism entails the denial of theism.

The other item of note is an article on the Dover, PA ID case by Villanova law professor Robert T. Miller. Miller thinks the case was rightly decided, but that the judge erred in saying that ID is religion. It’s not science, Miller says, in the sense that it provides an explanation for observed phenomena in terms of lawlike generalizations, but it’s not religion in the sense that it appeals to sacred texts or other purportedly revealed knowledge.

What ID does, he says, is posit an intelligent and purposive entity to explain observed phenomena. But such a deity-like being, by definition, doesn’t act according to prescribed law-like regularities, so ID can’t be science in a robust sense (Miller allows that it could be considered science in the “thin” sense that it offers a rational explanation for observed phenomena). ID is better understood as a kind of metaphysics, and not an especially promising kind compared to more traditional metaphysical arguments (e.g. the cosmological argument), for the same kind of “god of the gaps” reasons as mentioned above.

Miller suggests that, rather than trying to insert complicated philosophical arguments into science courses, it would be both constitutionally permissible and desirable for other reasons to have high schools offer a course on metaphysics where students learn about the classic philosophical arguments for God’s existence, as well as the criticisms of those arguments. Makes sense to me.

Fr. Richard John Neuhaus points to this amusing goof in historian Alan Brinkley’s review of Kevin Phillips’ new book American Theocracy in the New York Times Book Review:

“[Phillips] points in particular to the Southern Baptist Convention, once a scorned seceding minority of the American Baptist Church but now so large that it dominates not just Baptism itself but American Protestantism generally.”

Wow, the Southern Baptists are now in charge of baptism itself! Truly they have grown powerful!

Good news:

Three Christian peace activists kidnapped last year in Iraq were freed on Thursday in a morning raid by multi-national forces in western Baghdad.

Fears for the three men – two Canadians and a Briton – grew two weeks ago after a fellow hostage was found dead in a Baghdad street.

Military officials said none of the kidnappers was present during the raid, and that no shots were fired.

[…]

Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, said the rescue followed “weeks and weeks of very careful work by military and coalition personnel in Iraq and many civilians.”

However, Major General Rick Lynch, a US military spokesman in Baghdad, said a breakthrough came on Wednesday night after the arrest of two people, one of whom gave information that led to the raid.

Norman Kember, 74, of London, James Loney, 41, and Harmeet Singh Sooden, 32, were seized in Baghdad in November along with Tom Fox, a US citizen whose body was found two weeks ago.

Mr Kember was said to be in “reasonable condition” while the two Canadians were taken to hospital. Maj. Gen. Lynch said the hostages had been found bound, alone and “in good condition.”

Via Chris, Andrew Sullivan has a link to an alarming Pew poll indicating that American Christians (well Catholics and white Protestants anyway) are actually more likely to approve of torture than their secular (atheist or agnostic) fellow citizens. Way to go, team.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t there a well-known story about Roman soldiers torturing a suspected “insurgent” in an occupied Middle Eastern country about 2,000 years ago? I’m just sayin’.

This is a good (but ultimately depressing) article on the Democrats’ reaction to Russ Feingold’s motion to censure the president for, you know, breaking the law. Based on this account it was something of a desperation move on Feingold’s part after realizing that Congress was unwilling to do anything substantive about the warrantless wire-tapping:

Mr. Feingold said that he came to the idea of censure after three months of watching the N.S.A. issue wend its way through Congress and flail slowly into nothingness. “Even though [Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen] Specter was trying to hold hearings, they were weak. [Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales wasn’t addressing the issue. They were putting up a brick wall—their legal arguments were not persuasive.

“Then, when they briefed the [Senate] Intelligence Committee on the program—well, all I can say is that it was amazing how little we were told. All they get to do is listen to the administration—even when the administration doesn’t feel like talking. And then there was this proposal to break up the Intelligence Committee so that it could work even less effectively.”

From all this self-administered Senatorial gagging came only new legislation proposed by Senator Mike DeWine (R.-Ohio) that would essentially go back and retrospectively legalize the abuses of power under the N.S.A. program. “I wanted to see the headline then,” Mr. Feingold joked: “‘Republican Senate Proposes Law to Make Illegal Program Legal.’

“What they succeeded in doing, in other words, was to sweep the illegality under the rug,” Mr. Feingold said. “I decided it was time to include that on the record and came up with the censure proposal, to bring accountability back into the discussion. And I succeeded in doing that. That’s been achieved.”

The duck-and-cover response from Congressional Dems is reminiscient of their reaction to Jack Murtha’s call for a quick withdrawal from Iraq – dissociate themselves and fail to offer any substantive alternative:

“There is no leadership in the Democratic Party,” said Terry Michael by phone on March 20. He’s a former Democratic National Committee press secretary who now heads the Washington Center for Politics and Journalism. “If only the Democratic Party leaders were alive, they could accept a debate on this. But instead, their strategy is focused on how best to muddle through.”

This goes double, in Mr. Michael’s view, for the party’s funereal flight from debate on the war in Iraq. Indeed, he said, the cower-duck-and-run maneuvers that party eminences conducted in the wake of Mr. Feingold’s announcement was almost identical to the drear chorus of prim disapproval when Pennsylvania Congressman John P. Murtha disavowed his early support of the Iraq war and called, last November, for rapid draw-downs of the U.S. troop presence.

Heavyweight aspirants to the ’08 Presidential nomination—people like Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware—clucked their disapproval and stressed how Mr. Murtha only spoke for himself. For her part, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi mewled that she didn’t cotton to Mr. Murtha’s resolution but respected him as a veteran and part of the Democratic Party’s grand mosaic of opinion.

Then, when Republican attacks on Mr. Murtha went haywire and addled freshman Congresswoman Jean Schmidt (R.-Ohio) called the decorated Vietnam vet a coward on the House floor, Ms. Pelosi managed to stir herself to an endorsement—when all was assuredly safe and the Murtha resolution was good and doomed anyway.

Granted there’s only so much that the Dems can do as a minority party, but with a president whose approval ratings are somewhere in the 30’s, you’d think they could manage to be a little more assertive.

Some readers may find this of interest. Here you can read the proceedings of a symposium on “pro-life progressivism” that was held last year at the law school of The University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.

(via the Acton Institute blog)

The Inquirer had an article this morning about poet/”memoirist” Mary Karr whose new book of poetry reflects on her recent conversion to Catholicism at age 40. What puzzles me here though is the idea of a “memoirist.” I get the idea that you might want to read the memoirs of a famous person or someone who’s accomplished some amazing feat. But what’s up with more or less random people writing their memoirs? Karr, according to the article, is working on her third set of memoirs! Isn’t that a bit presumptuous?

Of course, the same thing might be said about the blog…