Paul O'Donnell: April 2007 Archives

Two of America's biggest born-again tabloid sensations are getting together in a stage musical with all the hoopla of a tent revival meeting. One is Kathie Lee Gifford, the public Christian and former morning talk-show matron whose repeated bouts with the unforgiving press finally drove her to resign her spot on "Live with Regis and Kathie Lee." The other is Aimee Semple McPherson, the Pentecostal preacher whose mix of theatricality, sex appeal and old-time Christianity blossomed in the 1920s into global fame at the helm of her own Los Angeles megachurch.

Gifford, who told The Washington Post that she's been fascinated with McPherson for 35 years, has written the book and lyrics to "Saving Aimee," a musical that premiered recently at the Signature Theater outside Washington to warm reviews.

Once a household name, "Sister Aimee" is enjoying a bit of a comeback lately, including a recent PBS special. And why not? We live in an age that understands her methods--she was among the first to use the media to expand her ministry and to extend her fame through scandal: McPherson was suspected of faking her own kidnapping to drive up her radio numbers (and possibly to cover up an affair with her engineer).

"She was the very first tabloid queen," says Gifford, who briefly inherited that crown after her husband, former New York Giants star and "Monday Night Football" personality Frank Gifford, was lured into a compromising position by a woman in the employ of a salacious newspaper.

Any Tolkien fan can tell you that J.R.R. Tolkien, a faithful Catholic, was pals with pop theologian C.S. Lewis, and that he laced his Lord of the Rings trilogy with Christian theology. What's not always obvious, however, is how. What's a hobbit got to do with the Messiah?

The "new" Tolkien book, "The Children of Hurin" provides few clues to the casual reader. One of Tolkien's "Lost Tales"—early, unpublished Middle Earth stories written before "The Hobbit"—the new book was edited from manuscripts by Tolkien's son Christopher. You can see the master of Middle Earth's style developing: it's Tolkien, only more so: the battle scenes thrum so mythically that they sound at times like a translation of "The Baghavad Gita." The good guys are impliably, humorlessly principled. The plot is downright Greek: Our hero, a man named Turin, makes every tragic mistake available to a mythic mortal, including a few Sophocles didn't think of. Then he dies.

After all, he's only human. "The Children of Hurin" confirms that Tolkien's great spiritual subject is incarnation. In this book, as in his famous trilogy, taking physical form is a grim weight that leaves us susceptible to the workings of evil. And if the battle between good and evil takes place in this physical realm, those fully incarnated beings called humans are the main battleground.

Round One of that battle, recounted in "The Children of Hurin," goes to evil, and neither salvation nor the cavalry is anywhere to be seen by the end. In his forward, Christopher suggests that Turin's story is based in part on his father's childhood at the end of the 19th century. If so, it's no wonder the adult Tolkien would become one of the most prodigious fantasists of the 20th. Any fabricated world would be better than the one that inspired the miseries endured by poor Turin.

Back when Kristin Chenoweth had her own television show, she told Beliefnet that she hoped the show would "show the human face of Christianity." Nowadays, it's more than the face of Christianity that Chenoweth is showing. She appears nude (tastefully) in the May issue of the beauty magazine Allure, in a portfolio of actresses who bare all in the name of encouraging the magazine's readers to be proud of their own bodies.

More than her skittishness about her belly flab ("I'm not at my 'TV weight' right now," she reports), the "Wicked" star expresses nervousness about what fellow believers will think of the state of her soul. "I'm very religious," she says. "There are going to be some people who don't like that I did this, but I just pray to God that I've made the right decision."

We'd be praying along with Chenoweth if it were the first time she'd exposed her flesh for the camera. But a little more than a year ago she posed for a gallery in FHM, a magazine for immature--uh, young men. For FHM she wore a series of well-chosen bikinis; in Allure it's an artfully placed length of driftwood. But her publicist likely had more to do with both than the Lord. (We also wonder how inspired the average reader will be by nude photos of the likes of Chenoweth, Carla Gugino, Vanessa Williams or R&B singer Cassie, none of whom have any apparent flaws. But that's another post …)

From Sherlock Holmes to "Dragnet" to "CSI," we like to see a killer get his, in the form of comeuppance when the detective solves the crime, or in the judge's sentence, or best of all when he (or she) comes to some deservedly untimely end. But what's the opposite of typical justice? You'll see it in Sunday's made-for-TV movie "Crossroads," on CBS.

Justice is served perfectly when a grieving man works out a deal with the teenaged killer of his wife and child that gives them both new life. What's amiss here is that "Crossroads," a Hallmark Hall of Fame Presentation, touts itself as tale of forgiveness, which, some would say, is precisely what justice is not.

Not to say that the Bruce Murakami, the real-life man whose story is told in "Crossroads" and played here by Dean Cain (Superman on "Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman"), didn't forgive the real-life Justin Gutierrez after the drag-racing teen plowed into the family van carrying Cindy and Chelsea Murakami. In an interview with Murakami provided by Hallmark, he relates how, alone in the midst of grieving, he would say aloud, "I forgive you, Justin."

No less astonishing is the plea bargain that Murakami worked out with Gutierrez after four years of delays by the teenager's defense team. "I ruined five lives that day," says Gutierrez in Hallmark's version of the events that began with the crash in November 1998. "Six if you count me. Eight if you count my parents." Murakami's decision to wrest the power of justice from the courts was an uplifting, even transforming decision for both families involved.

Perhaps in hopes of breathing life into their fading made-for-TV movie franchise, Hallmark handed "Crossroads" to director John Kent Harrison, whose John Paul II bio-pic was considered a solid example of the genre. Harrison tells the story in large part as a crime procedural. Cain is nicely cast as the hot-headed Murakami, who at first demands justice for the perished members of his family and who blindly ignores his two sons in his grief.

The movie only skims the surface of its spiritual subject, however. The script telescopes the timeline into what seems like a few weeks, inhibiting our understanding of Murakami's emotional arc and needlessly babying the viewer. Worse, it unquestioningly depicts Murakami's first sight of Gutierrez: Expecting a metal-head, multiply pierced thug, he is jarred to encounter a clean-cut prep--so would a thug be any less deserving of his compassion?

Not everyone would agree that what Murakami does serves either God or humans. "Crossroads" shirks this debate, and never asks about the difference between the deal Murakami struck with his wife's killer and the open-ended forgiveness the real Murakami felt in his darkest moments. Instead, forgiveness remains unexplored territory in the media: Strange, since virtue occupies such a central place in the Christian teachings so widely ascribed to in our culture, articulated so plainly in the Lord's Prayer said by millions every week.

Some weeks back Idol Chatter brought you the flap over Daniel Radcliffe's appearance in "Equus" on the London stage. Some British parents were aghast that the 17-year-old child star of the Harry Potter movie series would bare all (as his role required) and thereby risk scandalizing young Potterphiles. But at least one group of Radcliffe fans are wearing smiles thanks to his recent revelations.

Interfaith Family.com, a site that advocates Jewish practice among those of mixed Jewish heritage, reports that Radcliffe, whose mother is Jewish, is "a 'certified tribe member' in at least one respect." Though Radcliffe has said in the past that he is not religious, an Interfaith Family writer claims to know "someone who saw the London stage production from a close-to-front row seat," and confirms that "it appears he had the procedure that almost all Jewish boys have when they are eight days old." (You fill in the blanks.)

The clincher, according to Interfaith Family, is that said surgery is " rarely performed nowadays on English Christian boys." We throw the question out to our readers on the British Isle: Does Interfaith Family's claim stand up? Click here for the Interfaith Family story; scroll down past the menschy Shia LeBeouf and slinky Amanda Byrnes.

There's more than one moment on Third Day's retrospective album "Chronology: Volume One," that so masterfully combines pain and hope, delicate lyrics and anthem rock, that you ask yourself, "How do they do that?" And then you remind yourself: "Oh...