{"id":4879,"date":"2005-07-25T08:58:46","date_gmt":"2005-07-25T08:58:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/seen-the-island.html"},"modified":"2005-07-25T08:58:46","modified_gmt":"2005-07-25T08:58:46","slug":"seen-the-island","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/seen-the-island.html","title":{"rendered":"Seen The Island?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Get Religion reports on the nervous reviews, including this one in The Hollywood Reporter<\/a><\/p>\n

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What\u2019s troubling from a political point of view is that these filmmakers have, perhaps unwittingly, delivered a film certain to give succor to the religious right. In this ethical horror story, scientists experimenting with human genetics to advance medicine and cure illness are cast as Dr. Frankenstein villains. The chief villain, Dr. Merrick (Sean Bean), mouths platitudes about curing leukemia but clearly has greed in his heart.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It’s never "troubling" when movies "give succor" to environmentalists, secular feminism or other ideologies. I daresay that if Dr. Merrick were a hero, the film would not be "troubling" but rather..oh, I dunno…"nuanced" or "complex," don’t you think?<\/p>\n

On an another spot on the life issues\/pop culture frontier, you have to wonder where Six Feet Under is headed. How can we avoid the irony of Nate, fussing for weeks about the unacceptability of a disabled child who would be so much darn trouble…being felled by his own brain anomoly, perhaps being left seriously impaired, dependent on the care of others? <\/p>\n

(Unless he’s dead of course.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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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. 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