Ted Haggard
has been making the media rounds in advance of next week's release of HBO's "The Trials of Ted Haggard" and an Oprah Winfrey episode featuring Haggard and his family. The documentary captures Haggard's life in the months after his downfall, as he ranges from a weird excitement at starting over to personal misery to anger at his old church for banishing him. His interviews have captured that same range. (The oddest interview so far is
the one he gave to Dan Gilgoff, where he thanks House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for her expressions of support after his fall. Pelosi issued a
statement denying any such support.)
I've mostly withheld comment, in keeping with my practice of
not saying much publicly about my 8 years of working for Haggard. But this month, after a couple meetings with Haggard and some of his old associates, I have been working on a small reflective essay, and I have been preparing for a scheduled interview with Haggard this coming Tuesday.
Well, I suppose my careful preparations are for naught.
The AP is reporting new allegations against Haggard. A young man who has been silent about an alleged relationship with Haggard has decided to speak out. Last night, New Life Church's pastor, Brady Boyd, issued a statement preparing church members, and the public, for the breaking news, and saying that while church leaders knew about this man and supported him financially, they did not give him hush money.
A month or so ago
I announced that I was looking for movies with Christian killers, and many of you helped out with titles that hadn't occurred to me. I've since seen more religiously motivated violence on screen than I care to recount, and I have a long way to go, but I'm enjoying this project (which is for my dissertation) and learning a lot.
So far, the worst--most ridiculous and far-fetched--Christian killer I've seen is
Jake Busey's
revivalist-terrorist in Robert Zemeckis'
Contact. The whole movie is pretty ridiculous, some outstanding cinematic effects aside. Every character is a caricature, and the point of the movie seems to be that whatever we're exploring--whether science or religion--in the end we're really just exploring (say it with me)
ourselves. If only
MST3K were still around to give this movie the proper treatment.
Busey's Christian revivalist hates Jodie Foster's scientist, though we're never told why; the fact that he's a fundamentalist is apparently explanation enough. Eventually, he straps a bomb to his chest and blows himself, a few scientists, and an expensive alien communication machine to kingdom come.
Which raises a question: What's the precedent for characterizing a Christian extremist as a suicide bomber? Timothy McVeigh might count, or maybe abortion clinic protestors of earlier days, but is this mostly an example of Hollywood's general tone-deaf-ness when it comes to religion? I'm not saying representations of, say, Arab Americans are any better, but still--why this conflation of Christian extremism and suicide bombing? What do you make of a characterization like this?
Categories: blogging,
media
Few blogs, or media of any kind, have been as arresting as the Boston Globe's
The Big Picture. Alan Taylor's blog tells captivating stories, post after post. Its big pictures offer windows into the small places we never see.
His
year-end retrospective is a masterwork, something to give yourself time to gaze at and think through. It's hard to choose just one representative, but I'll offer this photo of Maasai warriors in a bow-and-arrow battle with the Kalenjin tribe in Kenya:
Obviously, you should head over to the
Big Picture to see this and the whole retrospective in all its mind-boggling glory.
In my post on "Religulous," I made the point that Bill Maher exudes a shockingly self-righteous certitude in his own position--and at the movie's end, literally preaches a gospel of Maherism and warns doom for all who don't see his light. (The comments about this in the thread below echo a similar exchange at
Steven Waldman's blog.) I understand that the movie's denouement is over the top, and I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek when I called Maher a fundamentalist. But still, Maher's position on religion, religious people, and the only solution to the problem of religious belief sounds and smells like
fundamentalism: it's a belief on a raft, a triumphalist resistance to an apocalyptic problem.
Categories: Culture,
media
Killing the Buddha was one of my favorite web discoveries in the years just after college--a site packed with essays on religion that combined pained skepticism with genuine desire for human renewal. There was often a real humility to the...
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