{"id":4359,"date":"2006-11-28T10:49:49","date_gmt":"2006-11-28T10:49:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/11\/nativity-story-1.html"},"modified":"2006-11-28T10:49:49","modified_gmt":"2006-11-28T10:49:49","slug":"nativity-story-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/11\/nativity-story-1.html","title":{"rendered":"Nativity Story"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.americanpapist.com\/2006\/11\/amp-advance-movie-review-nativity.html\">The American Papist saw it &#8211; <\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p>But now a couple of the flaws (or more softly, insufficiencies) I found. The movie seems undecided which way it wants to go. On the one hand it wants the deep drama associated with presenting one of the most incredible events in human history, on the other hand the movie is so scared of coming across too heavy that it finds itself obligated to sprinkle (and sometimes spray) comedic relief wherever it can. The Three Wise men, for instance, end up acting more like the Three Stooges than anything else. The looks and reactions of the main characters to the difficulty of their situation and the uncertainty of their future more often provoked nervous (and heartfelt) laughs from the audience than concern. Granted, there are many poignant moments in the movie, and nothing can draw tears like seeing the story of Jesus Christ\u2019s birth portrayed on the big screen with Hollywood\u2019s full light and sound magic. But nevertheless, the constant switching between sadness and slapstick was a bit jarring, and not as polished as it could have been.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">The film has been widely previewed across the country over the past couple of days &#8211; if you saw it, tell us what you thought.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>ttp<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The American Papist saw it &#8211; But now a couple of the flaws (or more softly, insufficiencies) I found. The movie seems undecided which way it wants to go. On the one hand it wants the deep drama associated with presenting one of the most incredible events in human history, on the other hand the&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Nativity Story - Via Media<\/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\/viamedia\/2006\/11\/nativity-story-1.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Nativity Story - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The American Papist saw it &#8211; But now a couple of the flaws (or more softly, insufficiencies) I found. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4359\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}