{"id":431,"date":"2009-04-17T10:29:26","date_gmt":"2009-04-17T10:29:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/04\/porn-star-dies-catholic-theolo.html"},"modified":"2009-04-17T10:29:26","modified_gmt":"2009-04-17T10:29:26","slug":"porn-star-dies-catholic-theolo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/04\/porn-star-dies-catholic-theolo.html","title":{"rendered":"Porn star dies, Catholic theologian jumps on the grave"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Chambers.jpg\"Marilyn Chambers, who went from the “Ivory Snow” poster mom to star of the porn classic, “Behind the Green Door,” died on Easter Sunday<\/a>. She was 56. A fulfilling life? She was a mother in ral life it seems, but never fulfilled her dream to crossover into “legit” roles. (She is shown at right in 2000.) <\/p>\n

But Francis Beckwith, former head of the Evangelical Theological Association who recently “re-converted” to Catholicism and now writes at a blog called “What’s Wrong with the World?”<\/a> isn’t about to let Marilyn Chambers rest in peace. <\/p>\n

In a post<\/a> he derides Chambers as a kind of “community organizer” (he’s apparently referring to group sex scenes in her films, which he may be more familar with than I am) and criticized her obituary for having been written “as if she had actually accomplished something.” <\/p>\n

\n

Ms. Chambers, who died young (as is the case with virtually everyone in her “profession”), is portrayed as a cultural trailblazer who enlightened our culture to the “blessings” of anonymous, promiscuous, widely diverse, and videotaped, copulation. For this reason, you will hear no lamenting of the innumerable lives on which her example made chic the infliction of countless miseries. You will not hear of the unborn children killed, the addictions borne and nurtured, the marriages decimated, the offspring abandoned, the spouses betrayed, or even the diseases contracted–spiritual, mental and physical–that her “trailblazing” facilitated. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And he compares the obits about her to the insufficiently reverent treatments of the passing of the Rev. Jerry Falwell. I hadn’t know she died until I saw Beckwith’s post via the First Things<\/em> blog<\/a>, which has apparently removed the link. <\/p>\n

Welcome back to the church, Professor Beckwith. Requiescat in pace<\/em>, we like to say of the dead, but also, with the philosophers, de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marilyn Chambers, who went from the “Ivory Snow” poster mom to star of the porn classic, “Behind the Green Door,” died on Easter Sunday. She was 56. A fulfilling life? She was a mother in ral life it seems, but never fulfilled her dream to crossover into “legit” roles. (She is shown at right in 2000.) …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,7,3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-politics","category-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nPorn star dies, Catholic theologian jumps on the grave - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/04\/porn-star-dies-catholic-theolo.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Porn star dies, Catholic theologian jumps on the grave - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Marilyn Chambers, who went from the “Ivory Snow” poster mom to star of the porn classic, “Behind the Green Door,” died on Easter Sunday. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}