{"id":8123,"date":"2004-01-21T07:30:00","date_gmt":"2004-01-21T07:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/tempting_frank_rich.html"},"modified":"2004-01-21T07:30:00","modified_gmt":"2004-01-21T07:30:00","slug":"tempting_frank_rich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/tempting_frank_rich.html","title":{"rendered":"Tempting Frank Rich"},"content":{"rendered":"

George Neumayr on Rich’s insistent criticism of a movie he hasn’t seen.<\/a><\/p>\n

Rich naturally abstains from all the McCarthyite tactics he deplores. He just doesn’t want the film’s marketing — “a masterpiece of ugliness typical of the cultural moment, when hucksters wield holier-than-thou piety as a club for their own profit” — to succeed.<\/p>\n

But it is fitting of the New York Times and its sense of accuracy that The Last Temptation of Christ –a movie that wildly departed from the Gospels, even to the point of having Christ assist at the crucifixion of a fellow Jew — didn’t upset it. But The Passion of the Christ based on the Gospels does. Because Gibson doesn’t treat the Gospels as art — fictions to be reshaped according to liberal sensitivities — he is one artist Frank Rich and the Times won’t respect.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

George Neumayr on Rich’s insistent criticism of a movie he hasn’t seen. Rich naturally abstains from all the McCarthyite tactics he deplores. He just doesn’t want the film’s marketing — “a masterpiece of ugliness typical of the cultural moment, when hucksters wield holier-than-thou piety as a club for their own profit” — to succeed. But…<\/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-8123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nTempting Frank Rich - 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\/tempting_frank_rich.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Tempting Frank Rich - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"George Neumayr on Rich’s insistent criticism of a movie he hasn’t seen. Rich naturally abstains from all the McCarthyite tactics he deplores. 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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\/8123","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=8123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}