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The news that Tom Cruise has signed a deal to finance future movies with the owner of the Washington Redskins football team, Daniel Snyder, and his investment partners restores hope that we'll live to see "Mission Impossible 13." But what does it mean for the cause of religion in Hollywood? The key may be the Cruise-Gibson connection.

Since Tom's "firing" by Viacom chief Sumner Redstone, the press has paired Tom and Mel: two megastars whose faith--Scientology and Tridentine Catholicism, respectively--has ruined their careers. After Redstone told the Wall St. Journal last week that Cruise had committed "creative suicide" by behaving erratically over the past few months, word crept out that the real issue was Cruise's Scientology-based criticism of Brooke Shields's post-partum pill-popping on the "Today" show. Others said Cruise had done himself in when he riled the all-powerful Steven Spielberg. "It was well-known that Spielberg was not happy about the fact that Cruise used his junkets from 'War of the Worlds' to promote his religious beliefs," a source told AFP News.

Bolstering the Cruise-Gibson tie was director Rob Reiner's comment last week that Mel's apology for an anti-Semitic tirade wasn't enough; he had to apologize for anti-Semitism in his "The Passion."

Cruise's new deal with Snyder shows that there is Tom-Mel synergy going on, but it has more to do with moola than martyrdom. Like Mel, Cruise has signed with investors who look only at the bottom line, not at behavior or beliefs that might embarrass them at Hollywood happenings. Far from dousing Tom or Mel's faith-based fire, these outsiders may give the stars more room to express their religion in their films.

In the gospels, Jesus foretells of nations rising against nations, of famines and earthquakes, pestilence and other troubles--a millennial moment ABC cites in its special two-hour edition of tonight's "20/20," titled "Last Days on Earth." Lucky for Jesus, Stephen Hawking wasn't hanging around the banks of the Jordan, lowballing the odds of an earthquake strong enough to do us all in. That's precisely the problem with "Last Days on Earth," structured as a countdown of the eight most likely ways civilization as we know it will end. None of them, it turns out, are too likely. A beta-ray bloom caused by a collapsing star, or a supervolcanic eruption could scorch us all to death or blanket the Earth in sulfuric clouds. But as Hawking points out, neither has happened in 400 million years, so why sweat it?

Besides, if we're all toast, no one's going to be around to miss us, will they?

ABC doesn't address these existential questions to any satisfying degree. A Rapid City, South Dakota, preacher recalls Christ's warning to the disciples (see above) and in a few man-in-the-street montages, common folk say what they'd do given a few weeks or hours to live. We're left wanting to hear--and think--more about what we might do spiritually when all hope is lost.

The room where I screened the show did get a little quiet, however, when a NASA scientist expained that an asteroid is expected to pass within a 24,000 miles of Earth in 2029, and could return seven years later in line to wallop our favorite planet. If we fail to redirect this bit of cosmic mischief, we'd know the date of impact--and a rough idea of our death--to the hour. This scenario also yields the one bit of good news in ABC's show: a trauma psychologist predicts that the human race's response to a death-date certain will be to reach out to find love. Now that's a prediction Jesus would be down with.

How Jewish is Jackie Mason? "As a matzo ball," says the comedian. "Or kosher salami." So Jewish, that when Jews for Jesus published a pamphlet suggesting that Mason had accepted Jesus, he let loose with a $2 million lawsuit.

The pamphlet, also known as a broadside, which is still available (but hurry) on this website, features a cartoon image of Mason on the front, and asks, "Jackie Mason... A Jew for Jesus?" Inside, a lesson is built around Jackie Mason's famously politically incorrect shtik about the differences between Gentiles and Jews, punning egregiously on the titles of the comedians Broadway shows. "There's one thing [the commission of sin] where there's no difference between Jews and Gentiles," the copy reads, causing the cartoon Mason to exclaim, "No difference! There goes my whole show!"

Two million bucks seems a little bit of an overreaction to what appears to be, in the words of Jews for Jesus spokesperson Susan Perlman, "good-natured," if not to well-written, fun. But anyone walking around Manhattan this summer knows Jews for Jesus proselytizers have been out in force, and it's difficult to imagine a person more dependent on his Jewish identity for his livelihood than Jackie Mason, unless it's Ehud Olmert, or a rabbi--which, for the record, Mason is. Ordained at 25 following four generations of tradition in his family, he also became a comedian, his website says, because "somebody in the family had to make a living."

Like any good Jew, Shawn Green had to wander the desert for a few years before coming to the Promised Land. The All-Star outfielder, who was traded to the New York Mets yesterday after playing his last seven seasons in Los Angeles and Arizona, will become the first Jewish player in New York, the U.S. city with the highest concentration of Jews, since Dave Roberts, who pitched briefly for the Mets in 1981 (though more locals likely remember pitcher Ken Holtzman of the late '70s Yankees).

The Green trade had been brewing for a while, and, in a time of relatively few Jewish ballplayers, Jewish New Yorkers have been relishing the possibility of a high profile player of their faith. "Mazel tov and zei gesund. I'll gladly have him over to break bread at my Shabbos table anytime," wrote "n8genius" on Metsblog.com earlier this month. "He can stay for the High Holy days here in Brooklyn, and I'll even put on Tefilin with him everday if he hits. Please, a Jew on the Mets would be a pleasure no words could express."

After the trade, Green himself, using athletes' practiced bland-speak, signaled similar feelings: "Had I played my whole career and never played in New York, I always would have wondered what it was like."

Before he could be traded, Green had to go through waivers--a sort of Purgatory in which a player can be claimed by any team in the league if a trade isn't made in three days. But Green has also cleared a higher form of waivers: Yom Kippur this year is the last day of the regular baseball season, and won't keep Green from playing in crucial playoff games.

A full list of Jewish baseball players is available here.

There are comics strips about babies, romance, the Army, sports, teenager, knights, Vikings and car mechanics. Ready for charitable Christians? King Features Syndicate, the purveyor of daily comics from "Apartment 3G" to "Zits" has introduced "Heaven's Love Thrift Shop," a strip by Kevin Frank, in which the shop's three employees, including a zany 20-something named Dag, subtly and not so subtly promote the Christian message.

Frank is certainly not the first Christian to work pious programming into comic strips. Charles Schultz acknowledged that "Peanuts" was grounded in his faith, a fact Robert L. Short developed in his 1965 book "The Gospel According to Peanuts." Al Hartley, who drew "Archie," composed special Christian versions of the famous carrot-top and his friends. "Heaven's Love Thrift Shop," however, is considered the first explicitly Christian strip offered by a mainstream syndicator. (And it will appear only on Sundays.)

It goes without saying that Frank says he doesn't consider his to be a "Christian" strip. "I like to think there’s an audience for it among all kinds of people," he recently told the Associated Baptist Press. And in a way he's right. Though the strip's eponymous shop is dedicated to helping the homeless and other indigent folks, I haven't been seen any of them in the strip (so far). The cute setups and mild zingers, about par for newspaper comedy, depend more on current topics like cell phones and caffeine consumption for their humor than the Good Book.

James C. Hunter's book "The Servant," is hardly something new in the business-leadership genre: its theme, that execs should be not taskmasters but facilitators of their employees' growth as human beings, was first struck by Robert Greenleaf in his 1977...

All Hollywood wants for Christmas is another "Passion"-sized blockbuster, without the Mel-sized controversy. This year's hopes are placed on a chronology of Christ's birth and toddlerhood titled "The Nativity Story," due for December release, and Time Warner's New Line Cinema...

Fox News reports that Disney is looking for other distributors on which to unload scandal-tainted Mel Gibson's new movie, "Apocalypto," about the mysterious expiration of the Incan Empire. Fox's sources point to Lion's Gate Films, which picked up Kevin Smiths'...

Earlier this summer, I wrote in this space about the growing popularity of Faith Night promotions at minor-league baseball stadiums. The faith in question was typically Christianity. Leave it to the Newark Bears, an independent New Jersey team, to celebrate...

Is California’s tradition of spiritual experimentation a kind of faith in itself? In a new book, "The Visionary State: A Journey Through California's Spiritual Landscape," writer Erik Davis and photographer Michael Rauner explore California’s long history--make that pilgrimage--from promised land...