Paul O'Donnell: April 2008 Archives

Time magazine profiles Stephenie Meyer, author of the vampire-ridden Twilight series whose first non-"Twilight" book, "The Host' will be out next month. Citing her unlikely rise to best-sellerdom (Meyer was a Phoenix, Ariz. housewife when she penned the first "Twilight" novel) and her 5 million copies in print, Time compares Meyer's success to J.K. Rowling's. But where Rowling's lightly held Christianity factored heavily in her Potter books, Meyer's deeply felt Mormon faith is only hazily visible in her work.

The movie "Expelled" dropped out of the box-office top 10 this week, but is back in the news thanks to Yoko Ono, who has sued Premise Media, the production company behind "Expelled," for using a 10-second clip of "Imagine," by Ono's ex-Beatle husband John Lennon. Needless to say, the "Expelled" folks, who equate the intelligent-design debate with the Cold War in their movie, are doing their best to turn a copyright infringement case into World War Three.

We're no longer shocked when a popular Christian figure does something to invite the scorn of his or her faithful (so to speak) fans. But when Azariah Southworth, host of "The Remix," a popular Christian version of MTV's "Cribs" told a Nashville paper last week that he's gay, the response was truly astounding: nothing. "I know I will be cut off from many within the Christian community," he told Out & About (adding, "and if so, then they didn’t get the point of the life of Christ"). But so far he says his employers have yet to inform Southworth that he's been fired. And though he says his inbox is filling up with emails supporting his decision to out himself, few are from those who watch the show.

There's a wonderful moment toward the end of "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," Ben Stein's new documentary on the intelligent design controversy, where Oxford zoologist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins speculates on how life came to be. Beings from somewhere else in the universe, he says, may have developed self-replicating molecules and planted them in the primordial ooze, giving birth to the first single-celled organisms and the great chain of evolution. Even cold-eyed rationalists, it seems, have their creation myths. To see Dawkins pitch his, hedging and hemming as he goes, is more than odd; it's daffily sweet.

That Dawkins has the best moment in a film advocating for intelligent design, however, spells trouble for "Expelled." For Dawkins, author of the best-selling book "The God Delusion," intelligent design is one particularly virulent symptom of a broader ill known as religious faith. This is precisely what the intelligent design people in the film tell us their inquiry is not about, and precisely what their opponents tell us it is.

If many Americans actually pull up Charlton Heston's face-wigged visage when they think of Moses, it's worth noting that Time magazine considered Heston "ludicrously miscast" as the biblical patriach in Cecil B. DeMille's epic "Ten Commandments." The hammy, melodramatic style of Hollywood's big-budget midcentury heyday obscures the fact that Heston, who starred in some of the most overblown productions of the time, was a powerful enough actor to anchor these operatically-scaled monstrosities--and imprint his depictions of mountaintop characters like Moses on our hearts and retinas.

Heston never shied from religion. Besides Moses, he played Ben-Hur and the Christian warrior El Cid. Given the superiority of the Oscar-winning 1965 movie version of "A Man for All Seasons" starring Paul Scofield, we suspect Heston's 1988 remake, with him in the title role, was made out of devotion to the story of Thomas More's implacable faith.

The New York Times House & Home section yesterday took an oddly spiritual leap with a feature about a house they bill as "death-defying." The house, being built for a mysterious set of owners in the Hamptons, on Long Island,...

Which is more draining, world-class athletic training or rigorous spiritual and intellectual learning? Ask Yuri Foreman, a fighter who will defend his light middleweight boxing title tonight, and who is studying to become an Orthodox rabbi. The 27-year-old was born...