{"id":7754,"date":"2004-03-10T21:39:20","date_gmt":"2004-03-10T21:39:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/two_more_passion_views.html"},"modified":"2004-03-10T21:39:20","modified_gmt":"2004-03-10T21:39:20","slug":"two_more_passion_views","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/two_more_passion_views.html","title":{"rendered":"Two more Passion Views"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the Revealer<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s sobering that the Passion–which has after all furnished the themes and iconography for many of the greatest achievements in Western art–should be reduced to this sort of clinical and near-fascistic sanctimony. More sobering still is the way that most American believers have rushed to embrace The Passion of the Christ on the terms it presents itself, as a faithful, super-realistic account of the most critical episode in Western religious history. Far from being the greatest story ever told, Gibson\u2019s film is the loudest command ever barked. And in heeding it so unthinkingly, most of the players who are stoking its unprecedented popular appeal–the media, the cynical culture warriors, and perhaps most grimly of all, the well-meaning moviegoing public–find themselves assigned bit parts in a spectacle that\u2019s ultimately far more gladiatorial than gospel-minded. Thanks to this supremely cynical act of visual repackaging, Mel Gibson has performed his own sort of miracle, turning the vicarious identification with Jesus\u2019 suffering into an expressionless bloodbath. In accepting this as a literal account of the Passion\u2019s scourging truth, many an earnest believer bypasses the movie’s actual significance: the casual consignment of the West’s most powerful life-and-death spiritual drama to the inert, ever-mounting body count of our mass entertainments. Surely this cannot be what Jesus meant when he said he came to “bring not peace, but a sword.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And From Richard Alleva<\/a><\/p>\n

However static The Passion is schematically, many individual scenes possess vitality, oddity, poetry. The use of Aramaic and Latin saves the dialogue from the tonal gaffes even the most intelligent biblical movies lurch into. A world-class cinematographer, Caleb Deschanel (The Black Stallion, The Natural), gives us a world seen by torchlight, so golden and so dank that you can well understand why the people in it yearn for messiahs, yet crucify them when they appear. His framing, too, is wonderful: when Simon of Cyrene stoops to relieve Jesus of his burden, the foreheads of the two men incline toward each other under the tilted cross, and a poignant communion hovers in the air. John Wright\u2019s editing maintains the battering pace Gibson obviously wanted. The costumes actually look like clothes, and I can pay the designer, Maurizio Millenotti, no higher compliment than that.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the Revealer It\u2019s sobering that the Passion–which has after all furnished the themes and iconography for many of the greatest achievements in Western art–should be reduced to this sort of clinical and near-fascistic sanctimony. More sobering still is the way that most American believers have rushed to embrace The Passion of the Christ on…<\/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-7754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nTwo more Passion Views - 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\/2004\/03\/two_more_passion_views.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Two more Passion Views - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"From the Revealer It\u2019s sobering that the Passion–which has after all furnished the themes and iconography for many of the greatest achievements in Western art–should be reduced to this sort of clinical and near-fascistic sanctimony. 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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\/7754","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=7754"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7754\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}