Idol Chatter

I’ve already ranted here once before about actor Stephen Baldwin’s brand of gnarly, extreme sports-themed Christianity, so I feel a little bit guilty about pointing out that the hip, high-class Salon magazine has a new profile on Baldwin–conveniently timed for the release of his memoir, “The Unusual Suspect.” In the article, Baldwin makes such enlightened…

TomKat is probably so busy planning for the big wedding next month in Italy that they won’t even notice that Scientology is going to get another bad rap in the limelight this Saturday night, as CBS’s “48 Hours” focuses on the controversial murder case of Elli Perkins. Back in 2003, Perkins was stabbed to death…

Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting, is now over. But Naeem Randhawa’s revealing new documentary, “American Ramadan,” (released this month) continues to chug its way around the world. Its been picked up by local PBS channels, Link TV, and international satellite stations such as Pakistan’s GEO TV and Al-Jazeera. First-time director Randhawa takes a…

The “Show Me” state’s airwaves have been overrun with showmen these past two weeks, leading up to a hotly contested Senate race between incumbent between Republican Sen. Jim Talent, who opposes an embryonic stem cell initiative, and Democratic challenger Claire McCaskill, who supports it. Celebrities including Michael J. Fox, Sheryl Crow, Particia Heaton, and Jim…

Ted Neeley, the former rock drummer who played the title superstar in the movie “Jesus Christ Superstar,” is still on the road, playing Jesus in the original stage musical. In an interview with The Dialog, the Catholic diocesan paper of Wilmington, Del., Neeley, now 65, remembers the night the show opened in 1971, when protestors…

Blogging about negative campaigning could seem as old and trite as blogging about taxes: There’s a sense that it’s never gonna change. We even have news networks whose bias is so pervasive that their negativity (or positivity) about certain causes and people is predictable even before the non-media spin types get started. But now there’s…

Last year, a sketch character called Borat sang a song advising the world to throw the Jews down the well so his country could be free, and in the process he managed to convince the patrons in a country-western bar to sing along. The world’s response? Some Jewish organizations were predictably fearful–worrying about the possibility…

Laura Marshall (Laura Linney), an extreme religious fundamentalist, is the villain in “Driving Lessons,” a semi-autobiographical comedy written and directed by Jeremy Brock. But is Brock, who also incorporated spirituality into his adaptation of “The Last King of Scotland” (co-written with Peter Morgan), commenting on what he sees as the repressive nature of that type…

It’s a little surprising to me that not one, but two movies centered around magical illusion as an art form have made their ways into theaters in the last few months. Edward Norton’s “The Illusionist” came and went rather quickly last summer, but last weekend’s opening of director Christopher Nolan’s (“Memento”) “The Prestige” was considerably…

Hindu goddesses and saints dressed in tight-fitting leotards and modern clothes, walking the violent streets of modern cities, wielding fantastic weapons and fighting evil and wrongdoers: You’ll find all of this and more in the new Shakti line of comics from Virgin Comics. With names like “Devi,” “The Sadhu,” “Snake Woman,” and “Ramayan Reborn,” these…

More from Beliefnet and our partners