{"id":7839,"date":"2004-02-26T09:17:56","date_gmt":"2004-02-26T09:17:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/02\/gregg_easterbrook.html"},"modified":"2004-02-26T09:17:56","modified_gmt":"2004-02-26T09:17:56","slug":"gregg_easterbrook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/02\/gregg_easterbrook.html","title":{"rendered":"Gregg Easterbrook"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the New Republic<\/a><\/p>\n

Beneath all the God-talk by Gibson is a commercial enterprise. Gibson’s film career has been anchored in glorification of violence (the Mad Max movies) and in preposterous overstatement of the actual occurrence of violence (the Lethal Weapon movies). Gibson knows the sad Hollywood lesson–for which audiences are ultimately to blame–that glorifying or exaggerating violence is a path to ticket sales. So Gibson decides to make a movie about Jesus, and what one thing differentiates his movie from the many previous films of the same story? Exaggerated glorification of violence.<\/p>\n

Numerous other devout depictions of the Jesus story–including the 1979 movie simply called Jesus, which, as recently reported by Easterblogg’s colleague Franklin Foer, numbers among the most-watched films of all time owing to its showing in churches–downplay the flogging of Jesus and focus instead on his suffering on the cross. That is to say, numerous other devout depictions of the Jesus story take the same approach as taken by the four Gospel writers. Gibson instead decided to emphasize and glorify the story’s violence. Hollywood has indoctrinated audiences to expect to see violence glorified and exaggerated: Gibson now gives audiences a Jesus story in which the violence, not the spiritual message, is the centerpiece. This is a deeply cynical exercise, and one that results in money in Gibson’s pocket. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the New Republic Beneath all the God-talk by Gibson is a commercial enterprise. Gibson’s film career has been anchored in glorification of violence (the Mad Max movies) and in preposterous overstatement of the actual occurrence of violence (the Lethal Weapon movies). Gibson knows the sad Hollywood lesson–for which audiences are ultimately to blame–that glorifying…<\/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-7839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nGregg Easterbrook - 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\/02\/gregg_easterbrook.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Gregg Easterbrook - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"At the New Republic Beneath all the God-talk by Gibson is a commercial enterprise. 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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\/7839","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=7839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7839\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}