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Idol Chatter hardly needs to add to the barrage of quips, canned responses, and commentary about Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic outburst during his arrest early Saturday morning. Sadly, even in the 21st century, and even from stone sober blatherers, talking crazy about "the Jews" is about as surprising as a cyclist failing a urine test and, pathetically, less consequential: Mel will continue to make movies and Americans will continue to go see them. The folks who might have abstained from his flicks because of his "Jews start all the wars" tirade likely already abstain because of Mel's refusal to denounce his father's Holocaust-denial views, and because of "The Passion" itself.

Two questions, however fall clearly into Idol Chatter's orbit: how Mel's late-night chat affects the future of Christian filmmaking, and how to summarize Mel's career in the field, which is likely over. (His spokespeople are even sounding vague about his proposed series on the Holocaust, conceived as a sop to those who found "The Passion" disturbingly anti-Semitic.)

Much of the buzz "The Passion" created in Christian film circles, and the access to the wider cinema market it suddenly promised, will no doubt be harmed, if not quashed, by Mel's mumblings of Saturday night. None of the Christian filmmakers I've encountered have betrayed any of Mel's millennial mania, but if the scandal won't end Mel's career, skittish producers will be less willing to take risks with other, fledgling filmmakers who depict Jesus, lest they share the taint of anti-Semitism by association. This is a shame, since even those who disagreed with "The Passion" had to see that it promised, at least, more intelligent screen explorations of the Christian story and message.

Indeed, future films about Jesus (or old-fashioned Jesus figures) are the more sorely needed because of "The Passion." Mel's latest eruption betrayed just how lost he is amid the affinity many conservative Christians have developed toward Judaism and today's Jewish people, beyond the old Christian right's attachment to Israel as the custodian of the Holy Land. Theologically, some important evangelical voices see Jesus as one who came to the Jews as a Jew, bent on reforming his own religion and society; the world's salvation, some new thinking goes, came not in despite of his co-religionists' history, but completely on its terms, and on its wings. It's an exciting and interesting route to go down, and one Mel's ugly spiritual cataracts apparently prevented him from seeing.

What do Jerry Falwell and the Sci-Fi Channel have in common? Okay, you can enter your comments below, but the real answer is that they both figure to lose if the U.S. Senate passes a so-called cable TV reform bill that would allow cable customers to pay for their television by the channel, instead of having to buy packages of hundreds of channels at once. If the bill becomes law, according to an editorial by Rev. Falwell, it will likely force much Christian televangelism off the air. That, says the founder of the Moral Majority, would be a very, very bad thing.

Why would a Congress stuffed with born-again Baptists do such a thing? The GOP majority is convinced that cable is too expensive, and too crowded with nasty niche programming that corrupts our children's minds. They hope that by mandating a per-channel payment system, more kids will see better, more wholesome fare.

But like many government mandates, this one may backfire. As one member of Congress who opposes per-channel billing explains, "Most consumers would pay more for less, as the sweeping rules would decimate small and niche programmers while hiking prices." Why? because cable channels that now get a share of HBO's subscription audience would be cut out of the picture if that audience could buy HBO alone.

Religious stations would be in the same boat as these other low-drawing stations. "Faith-based and family-oriented broadcasting does not draw the same level of advertising," says the Faith and Family Broadcasting Coalition's website. If forced to compete in a per-channel world, religious broadcasters would have to charge customers much more than they pay now just to survive. That would cause some customers to drop the Rev. Falwell and his bretheren; others, of course, would simply have less money to send to the ministries' 800 number.

What Irish monks did for the ancient classical texts, a dedicated group of evangelical missionaries may be doing for the world's disappearing languages. Since 1939, the Global Recordings Network has been spreading the gospel to remote parts of Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and to migrant farm workers in California, people they call "tailenders" because they are the last to be reached by progress. The GRN missionaries believe nothing builds trust like the language of the hearth, so they distribute recordings of Bible stories and Christian teachings in their prospective converts' own tongues, building hand-cranked cassette players and phonographs to play in . As a happy side effect, GRN, the subject of a documentary showing on PBS's series "P.O.V." tonight, has been building what may be the largest archive of dying languages in the world.

Less happy, in the view of the filmmakers, is what evangelism does to the people it reaches. Even the missionaries say that Christianity makes locals more willing to compromise with corporations who come to despoil their lands, and their converts say they were drawn by Western prosperity--cars and town living--as much as Christianity. GRN's volunteers, after all, are concerned with the fate of souls, not rainforests. The filmmakers are so anxious to signal their disapproval that they begin to burden the film with simplistic critiques, portraying GSN's efforts---indeed, American Protestantism itself--as "a syncretism of Christianity and technology." Eventually their overt hostility bogs down a film whose images alone do more to expose the wariness, awe, and desire of the tailenders than any voice-over lecture.

One of this summer's great pleasures has been watching the progress of Underoath, the Christian "screamo" band whose third album, "Define the Great Line," debuted at #2 on Billboard's 200 chart. That feat earned them a spot on the main stage of the Van's Warped tour, the 12-year-old traveling festival dedicated to the rock genre known as emo (think heavy-metal with a suggestion of melody).

Not that it has been all roses for Underoath. "Bands that haven't met us before are kind of sometimes skeptical," Underoath vocalist Spencer Chamberlain told a fan magazine recently. "Like, 'Oh man, these kids are not going to be any fun.' They judge us for something that Americanized Christianity has turned into which is everything that we kind of stand against."

Chamberlain would be referring to people like "Fat Mike" Burkett, of tourmates NOFX. "I like to point out to the crowd when we're on stage that Underoath doesn't believe that dinosaurs existed," Burkett related in an interview.

Rank-and-file headbangers, however, show signs of accepting Underoath, dinosaurs or no. During the Warped stop in Los Angels, the L.A. Times' reviewer, after making pro-forma cracks about Chamberlain's "Christ-like locks" and Underoath's "youth-group-revival feel," praised the group's "lush keys and daunting complexity," noting that the group's performance of their song "'I'm Drowning in My Sleep' isn't exactly 'Kum Ba Yah' by the campfire." High praise indeed.

New York City's public radio station, WNYC, has a wonderful segment today on a hair salon in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, that doubles as a Catholic shrine, crammed with ornate renderings of the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and the archangels, including a statue of the Infant of Prague that has 12 outfits that the owner changes each month. Says one customer, "It makes you feel safe in a way. I feel like I'm in church sometimes, but it's a good feeling."

The highpoint of 1960s Radical Chic has long been marked by a party held at Leonard Bernstein's Manhattan duplex at which the city's sparkling social elite gathered to meet members of the Black Panthers. The highpoint of 2000s Radical Chic,...

If you're the kind who likes to hit the beach armed not with literary fluff but with serious reading, surf's up: two of the year's most important and engaging books with a religious twist have been published just in time...

Since their American reissue in the 1970s, the Adventures of Tintin comic books have been dogged by the supposed racism and even downright Fascism of their pseudonymous author, Hergé. Relax, everyone: a documentary to be shown on PBS Tuesday explains...