{"id":5461,"date":"2005-07-13T23:34:35","date_gmt":"2005-07-13T23:34:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/forget-the-wizard.html"},"modified":"2005-07-13T23:34:35","modified_gmt":"2005-07-13T23:34:35","slug":"forget-the-wizard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/forget-the-wizard.html","title":{"rendered":"Forget the Wizard"},"content":{"rendered":"

This reader’s on to something….I’m very impressed:<\/p>\n

\n
\n
One thing that caught my eye is that a lot of your readers appear, like me, to be fans of Walker Percy.  I’ve been wondering if M. Night Shyamalan is a fan of Walker Percy’s as well, but I haven’t found any discussion of this.  What got me thinking along these lines are several apparent references to Walker Percy and The Thanatos Syndrome<\/em> in Shyamalan’s The Village<\/em>.  I went looking through your archives and saw some comments about the movie, but I didn’t see any mentioning the WP link.  The stuff I’m talking about includes several major characters with the last name "Walker," others with the last name "Percy," the setting being the fictional Covington Woods (while Walker lived in Covington, LA), the prominent watchtowers in the village (also highlighted during the credits and on the DVD) evoking the cover of Thanatos<\/em> (displaying the fire tower occupied by the priest), and the name of the love interest being "Ivy Walker" while my paperback edition of Thanatos<\/em> was published by Ivy Books.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Anyway, since you seem to be pretty tuned in, I thought you might let me know if you know of any discussion about Night and Walker.  I’d like to understand what he was getting at in The Village<\/em> with those references.  Maybe he just had the same paperback edition of Thanatos<\/em> sitting on his desk when he was writing the script.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Wouldn’t that be nifty? I see a dissertation a’borning, somewhere…..<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This reader’s on to something….I’m very impressed: One thing that caught my eye is that a lot of your readers appear, like me, to be fans of Walker Percy.  I’ve been wondering if M. Night Shyamalan is a fan of Walker Percy’s as well, but I haven’t found any discussion of this.  What got me…<\/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-5461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nForget the Wizard - 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\/2005\/07\/forget-the-wizard.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Forget the Wizard - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This reader’s on to something….I’m very impressed: One thing that caught my eye is that a lot of your readers appear, like me, to be fans of Walker Percy.  I’ve been wondering if M. 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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\/5461","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=5461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5461\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}