{"id":8022,"date":"2004-01-30T09:19:58","date_gmt":"2004-01-30T09:19:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/true_faith.html"},"modified":"2004-01-30T09:19:58","modified_gmt":"2004-01-30T09:19:58","slug":"true_faith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/true_faith.html","title":{"rendered":"True Faith"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the NYTimes, A.O. Scott compares the Passion skirmish over others in the past<\/a><\/p>\n

Well, it is and it isn’t. Hearing the charges of prejudice and persecution bouncing back and forth between Mr. Gibson’s critics and his partisans, I can’t help but recall the knot of quietly praying picketers I walked past 20 years ago to purchase a ticket for Jean-Luc Godard’s modernized gloss on Jesus’ birth, “Hail Mary,” a film whose nudity was taken, sight unseen, to be blasphemous.<\/p>\n

And I also recall the images from 1988 of demonstrators protesting Martin Scorsese’s screen adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s “Last Temptation of Christ,” a movie that some of the largest theater chains in the country refused to screen and that Blockbuster Video declined to stock on its shelves. There was also, more recently, the outcry in 1999 over Kevin Smith’s theological gross-out comedy “Dogma,” which was dropped by its original distributor, Miramax, after its parent company, Disney, drew fire from some Roman Catholic groups.<\/p>\n

The obvious thing to say about the skirmishes over “Passion,” which will either subside or intensify once the movie opens nationally on Ash Wednesday, Feb. 25, is that, since those earlier dust-ups, the sides have reversed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You might also be interested in a 1996 Carol Iannone article in First Things: The Last Temptation Reconsidered<\/a><\/p>\n

(Via Bill Cork<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the NYTimes, A.O. Scott compares the Passion skirmish over others in the past Well, it is and it isn’t. Hearing the charges of prejudice and persecution bouncing back and forth between Mr. Gibson’s critics and his partisans, I can’t help but recall the knot of quietly praying picketers I walked past 20 years ago…<\/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-8022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nTrue Faith - 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\/01\/true_faith.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"True Faith - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In the NYTimes, A.O. 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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\/8022","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=8022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8022\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}