November 8, 2007 Archives

Russell Crowe--who has long played heroic figures on the big screen while being portrayed off screen as nothing more than an angry brute--has told Men’s Journal magazine that he hopes to be baptized in the near future. The actor, who had his oldest son Charlie baptized, is considering joining his youngest son Tennyson in the process when Tennyson is baptized in the near future. "If I believe it is important to baptize my kids, why not me?" Crowe commented.

Such a declaration of religious inclination--if perhaps not an outright statement of faith--shouldn't be that surprising. Crowe built a Byzantine chapel on his farm in Australia for his wedding and spoke at great length about his thoughts on religion in 2005 with Interview magazine. In the article he describes visiting various churches on his own when he was young, and comments that he has a "thing" for the Ten Commandments and believes that it "seems like it was written by somebody other than a human being."

So maybe Crowe's baptism reflects a deepening of his spiritual journey, or maybe this is simply a "communal act," as he described baptism in the Interview magazine story, and not about faith at all. Either way, if it helps him with his anger management issues, I am sure hotel clerks and body guards everywhere feel a little safer now.

Just as I reluctantly entered the fray over "The Da Vinci Code" movie debate, I am not interested in giving more free ink to the film adaptation of Philip Pullman’s "The Golden Compass." I am not going to call for a boycott, and I am not going to ramble about conspiracy theories or agendas. However, given fellow blogger Donna’s numerous and effusive posts in support of Pullman, I feel some responsibility to point to other Christian responses that are neither fundamentalist, Bible-thumping rantings nor uninformed, unscholarly musings (not that I think Donna falls into either of those categories, but she seems to think most critics do fit into these two groups).

If you are interested in reading well-thought-out arguments by critics who know the fantasy genre much better than I do yet still do not support the notion of Pullman's very tolerant, magnanimous literary intentions, I suggest you read fantasy author Jeffrey Overstreet's anaylsis, in which he describes in detail his respect for Pullman's writing while pointing out that with Pullman's anti-religion bias, he still never has the courage to deal with the true nature of Christ himself.