One of the joys of reading is being able to bounce around and read lots of different things as the fancy takes me. Here, in no particular order, are a few thoughts on a few of the books I’ve read so far this summer.

The Lost Virtue of Happiness: J.P. Moreland and Klaus Issler. I think this is an important, even an essential book. In combination with a lecture by Dr Moreland that I heard this summer (and wrote about here), this book helped me put some pieces together in my own heart about trusting God and taking risks along the road toward true happiness: eudaimonia, a life well lived.

Searching for and Maintaining Peace: Father Jacques Philippe. I’m a very intense person, so Fr Philippe’s writing has helped me fully realize what “peace” really is. It is not being unemotional, or unreactive, or detached in a negative sense, but rather is something deeper, a real sense of trust in God, not tied to particular outward circumstances. For instance, I sometimes recognize that I am not at peace even when I am outwardly calm, solitary, and silent, because I am clinging to some fear or anxiety in my heart. In contrast, I just spent almost two weeks in residency at Biola, a spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually challenging time with a lot of outward activity and stimulating discussion… and in reflecting on the residency, I realize that I was completely at peace during that time.

At this rate, my comments on Fr Philippe’s book will be longer than the book itself, so let me just pull one quote from it to show how to-the-point and sensible he is: “If we wait until we are saints to have a regular life of prayer, we could wait a long time. On the contrary, it is in accepting to appear before the Lord in our state of sin that we will receive healing and will be transformed, little by little, into saints.”

Authentic Communication: Tim Muehlhoff and Todd V. Lewis. A must-read for anyone who wants to share their faith in a loving, respectful, and also effective way. It’s also excellent just in terms of explaining effective interpersonal communication. Our words can hurt or help others, strengthen friendships or weaken them; we should learn to use them well.

Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge: Dallas Willard. I’ll confess that I found this book slow going at first and I almost put it down a number of times… but I kept picking it up again. In the end I think that was best, because it meant that I read it slowly, and this is a book that’s sufficiently dense that it merits slow reading. The closing chapter in particular had an impact on me, with its call for pastors to live up to their responsibility to teach that we can have real knowledge of God. Though I am not a pastor, as a teacher (both in the secular world, and now within my church as well) I feel that this challenge applies to me as well. Also, although I know you can’t judge a book by its cover, I have to admit that I find the cover art to be simply lovely.

Mercy Among the Children: David Adams Richards. Richards is a new author for me, and I am delighted to have been introduced to his books (thanks, Fr. Kraft!). I won’t spoil this book by attempting to describe it, but I will say that it is exceedingly well written, and haunting.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society: Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. Oh! Absolutely delightful. It’s a “light reading” book, but one that is both very well written and very thoughtful. It’s funny, but with a serious side as well that comes out bit by bit as the book unfolds. It’s a love story and a paean to the fellowship of all who love books, and flat-out really fun to read.

Related posts:

1. Summer Reading Discussion!
2. Reading Versus Television: Which Is Better?
3. Developing a Taste for Good Books

Here are short reviews of two interesting books I’ve read recently. Enjoy!Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell. This could be a very short review: Read this book.

Sowell opens the book with the statement, “Intellect is not wisdom.” Just by itself, that is worth closing the book, sitting down, and reflecting for quite a while. We celebrate the accumulation of knowledge in the form of college degrees, regardless of whether the degree is really needed for a particular job, we reflexively defer to ‘experts’ on a variety of topics (even when they lack the firsthand knowledge that we have on a subject), and we seem willing to allow a few hyper-educated elites to make decisions for vast numbers of people. Where is wisdom in all of this? Relegated to backstage, or to the nursing home, since we seldom recognize our elders as sources of wisdom any more.

Sowell’s larger argument is that intellectuals, specifically defined as those whose work “begins and ends with ideas,” are not in our culture held accountable for their ideas in practice – but the ideas are often put into place anyway by a ruling elite who affirm each other in their existing ideas, independent of reality. The result is a dangerous situation in which the intellectual elite, with no feedback from reality, have an outsized effect on our government and society – not through any deliberate conspiracy or power grab, but by the workings of policy and the shaping of public opinion, especially in the media and academia. And yes, this is a very dangerous situation indeed – which is why you should buy this book, and read it, very carefully.

The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien. On what was probably my fourth try in the past 20 years, I finally finished The Silmarillion! Hooray! What’s even better is that I really enjoyed it.

As many a Lord of the Rings fan has discovered, The Silmarillion is nothing like The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. It is the mythic backstory to Middle Earth, the tale of the epic events that happened in the first, second, and third ages before the time of the Fellowship of the Ring. It is the tale primarily of the Elves, with human characters coming in only late in the story. Tolkien’s style here is epic; he is quite successfully modeling the stories after the great Norse and Germanic epics, with their sweep and grandeur.

One of the reasons I enjoyed The Silmarillion this time around is, I think, that I have been reading the Bible. I recognized the echoes of Genesis, and the themes of rebellion, sin, and redemption that are woven into the story. Tolkien is not trying to tell a Christian story directly – he is far too good a storyteller to do that – but the story overall is imbued at its deepest level with a Christian ethos. The echoes are good echoes, ones that cause the themes and ideas to resonate at a deeper level in the imagination; that is precisely what Tolkien, master fantasist, was best at. Not a quick or easy read, but in the end, deeply satisfying.

Thoughts?

Related posts:

1. A Trio of Interesting Books of the Murderous and Gothic Sort
2. Developing a Taste for Good Books
3. Summer Reading Discussion!

I happened across a wonderful interview that Time Magazine did just recently with Bishop NT Wright. Wright, one of the foremost theologians and biblical scholars of our time (and an excellent writer for both academic and popular audiences) discusses the misconception that most Christians have about heaven.

And, I’d add, most non-Christians. Before I was a Christian, I thought that what Christians believed was that they’d go to some disembodied heaven when they died, as a reward for being good. So you can count me in as another person who had the reaction Wright describes: “in almost all cases, when I’ve explained this to people, there’s a sense of excitement and a sense of, “Why haven’t we been told this before?”"

Read the full interview here (it’s not that long).

Related posts:

1. Meditating on the Apostles’ Creed, Part 2
2. Listening to God
3. The Romance of Celibacy

An article appeared in the New York Times recently called “The Moral Instinct.” The tagline is “Evolution has endowed us with ethical impulses. Do we know what to do with them?” The author, Steven Pinker, is a professor of philosophy; in the article he dissects the concept of morality, where it comes from, and what we ought to do about it, especially in a culture with competing ideas of what moral behavior is. I wasn’t intending to write about it, but some parts of the argument troubled me and wouldn’t let go. I found myself wanting to say at least something in the face of this polished, sophisticated, and entirely atheistic discussion of morality.

First off, I want to point out the one area that I think Pinker touches on the truth. He argues for the reality of morality, in much the same way that mathematics has reality: we are born with an intuitive sense of it which then develops as we grow. That, insofar as it goes, is actually quite a remarkable statement to make in today’s relativistic culture. (Perhaps that’s why Pinker waits until page seven of eight to make the claim.) So far so good – but I don’t agree with what he builds on that foundation.

For one thing, though he ends up with the position that morality has its own reality (or offers that position as a possibility; it is not clear whether this is his own position), Pinker argues that it is evolution that has given us a sense of morality, which can be described in terms of five different “spheres”: harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity (according to an anthropologist cited in the essay). Pinker then argues that differences between moral codes of different cultures comes largely from differing emphases of the importance of the spheres; some cultures value fairness highly, others value authority.

If you set aside the origins question, the idea of different spheres of morality seems to be a useful way of examining the issue. My concern is that while Pinker is assuming that there is an underlying morality common to all, his actual explication of the “moral spheres” can be used to justify a profoundly relativistic viewpoint.

All this brings us to a theory of how the moral sense can be universal and variable at the same time. The five moral spheres are universal, a legacy of evolution. But how they are ranked in importance, and which is brought in to moralize which area of social life — sex, government, commerce, religion, diet and so on — depends on the culture. Many of the flabbergasting practices in faraway places become more intelligible when you recognize that the same moralizing impulse that Western elites channel toward violations of harm and fairness (our moral obsessions) is channeled elsewhere to violations in the other spheres. Think of the Japanese fear of nonconformity (community), the holy ablutions and dietary restrictions of Hindus and Orthodox Jews (purity), the outrage at insulting the Prophet among Muslims (authority). In the West, we believe that in business and government, fairness should trump community and try to root out nepotism and cronyism. In other parts of the world this is incomprehensible — what heartless creep would favor a perfect stranger over his own brother?

The ranking and placement of moral spheres also divides the cultures of liberals and conservatives in the United States. Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres. In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five. It’s not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other side is base and unprincipled.

Here we have simply a description of what people think about morality… but behind it is the subtle assumption that, if both sides think they are right, that they are both wrong. The idea of “moral spheres” can with almost no effort at all be used to justify nearly anything. Just a couple of days after I read this essay, I was browsing through the religion section at Barnes and Noble and happened to pick up a book that claimed to explain the Bible’s perspective on sex. In the section on “homosexuality,” the book took the line that for the ancient Israelites, male/male sex was wrong primarily because it represented a transgression of boundaries, which was a serious offense for that culture at that time. The argument went on to say that in our culture, we no longer find boundary transgressions to be offensive; just as we no longer worry about wearing linen and flax together, we no longer need to worry about homosexuality. A neat little argument, except that it doesn’t work: for one thing, something could be both a transgression of boundaries and a sin for other reasons, and for another thing, while many aspects of the Old Testament law no longer apply after the coming of Christ, the New Testament is quite clear that sexual immorality isn’t one of them.

The larger point is that I could see how easy it is to use the idea of “moral spheres” to bolster cultural relativism. In the case of Pinker’s essay, as he describes different moral senses in different cultures, it does not occur to him that some of those moral senses might be off track.

As we go on, to Pinker’s credit he does notice the problem with the relativistic approach to morality that inevitably comes out of a biological explanation:

Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?

But Pinker makes short work of God as the source of morality:

Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not — if his dictates are divine whims — why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others — if a command to torture a child was never an option — then why not appeal to those reasons directly?

It seems to me that Pinker has disposed of God rather hastily. He does touch on a philosophical question about God, but does no service to his argument by leaving the answer in Plato’s hands. Yes, Plato was a great philosopher, but he is also an example of the limits of the reason, left to itself, to discover God. Plato understood that God is real – as we can do, by our own observations of nature and self-reflection – but at his point in history and culture, he had not heard God’s self-revelation. Now, that puts us in another argument, potentially, which is whether there is such a thing as revealed truth or not, but Pinker doesn’t acknowledge that there’s even the possibility.

Morality comes from God, and He is good; that is part of His identity, being completely good. Contrary to pop-culture philosophy, it doesn’t somehow “disprove” God to recognize that there are things an omnipotent God can’t do: He can’t do what’s logically impossible (make a square circle) or what goes against His own nature (do something evil).

That is what the Ten Commandments are really about – not about us, so much, but about God. By giving us a list of commandments to guide us in moral behavior, we learn that God is good. In a world of competing deities whose claim to worship lay on what they could do for the worshiper (or what they’d do to the worshiper if said worship was unsatisfactory), there was no way for the early Israelites to know that the God who was One was also good, unless He let them know that. And He did.

Generations of philosophers have worked to develop an understanding of morality as given by God, but Pinker presses the “skip” button and bypasses the entire Christian intellectual tradition. That’s a pity, because that’s precisely where we find the insights that Pinker is looking for.

Pinker continues,

This throws us back to wondering where those reasons could come from, if they are more than just figments of our brains. The only other option is that moral truths exist in some abstract Platonic realm, there for us to discover, perhaps in the same way that mathematical truths (according to most mathematicians) are there for us to discover.

The only other option? Like I said, the author has rather too swiftly washed his hands of God. If there is indeed an abstract Platonic realm of moral truths, how were they created? And does it really make sense that moral truths, which fundamentally all have to do with relationship, just “are”? I think it makes a whole lot more sense that our morality comes from a Maker, Who is good.

One thing that the “Platonic morals” idea fails to explain is why we humans have such a hard time actually living up to these morals. (CS Lewis deals with this brilliantly in Mere Christianity). Nobody who has a normal intelligence has any difficulty with basic mathematics, with adding 2+2 and getting 4 every time. We do quite a lot of math on a daily basis even if we’re not “math” people; we take it for granted. Morality is different. We agree both that it exists, and that we routinely struggle with living up to it. Why? If we can see what constitutes “virtue”, why can’t we live that way?

Paul articulates it perfectly in Romans 7: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” Any naturalistic theory of the moral instinct must also account for why we sense it so strongly but at the same time are so unable to fulfill it. All our other instincts, for food, sleep, sex, recreation – these we can fulfill. But we can’t live up to the dictates of morality. Why not?

There is no naturalistic explanation that adequately explains it; what does explain our failure is the doctrine of the Fall. We are fallen creatures; we are broken. We have turned away in pride from the source of all morality, all good, and yet we are made in God’s image. Taken together, the fact that we have a strong moral sense and the fact that we cannot live up to it, point strongly to the existence of a good God and a fallen world.

One test of a theory is in its explanatory power: how well does it account for other things? The Christian understanding of morality as coming from God fits the evidence out there in the world; it allows us an exceptional understanding of both our aspirations and our failures. That’s solid support of its truth value, that it captures both the upside and the downside. For someone who is determined to resist the possibility that God exists, this theory gets rejected a priori. But it’s there.

I’ve left for last what ends up being the most troubling part of the whole essay – its opening.

Pinker asks the reader who is more admirable: Mother Teresa, Bill Gates, or Norman Borlaug? He says that most people will choose Mother Teresa, and he goes on to claim that this response is due to a “moral illusion”:

Yet a deeper look might lead you to rethink your answers. Borlaug, father of the “Green Revolution” that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history. Gates, in deciding what to do with his fortune, crunched the numbers and determined that he could alleviate the most misery by fighting everyday scourges in the developing world like malaria, diarrhea and parasites. Mother Teresa, for her part, extolled the virtue of suffering and ran her well-financed missions accordingly: their sick patrons were offered plenty of prayer but harsh conditions, few analgesics and dangerously primitive medical care.

It’s not hard to see why the moral reputations of this trio should be so out of line with the good they have done. Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth. Gates is a nerd’s nerd and the world’s richest man, as likely to enter heaven as the proverbial camel squeezing through the needle’s eye. And Borlaug, now 93, is an agronomist who has spent his life in labs and nonprofits, seldom walking onto the media stage, and hence into our consciousness, at all.

I doubt these examples will persuade anyone to favor Bill Gates over Mother Teresa for sainthood. But they show that our heads can be turned by an aura of sanctity, distracting us from a more objective reckoning of the actions that make people suffer or flourish. It seems we may all be vulnerable to moral illusions the ethical equivalent of the bending lines that trick the eye on cereal boxes and in psychology textbooks.

What are the lessons that we are invited to draw from this?

1. Personal virtue is not real. Note that Mother Teresa is dismissed as having an “aura of sanctity” that turns our heads.

2. The ends are more important than the means; what we do is separate from and more important than who we are.

3. Material well-being is more important than spiritual health.

I don’t believe that any of these conclusions are true – and I think they are all three of them very dangerous.

Our cynical age wants to dismiss Mother Teresa, to say that she was a sham, a self-deceiver, wasting her time. We want to say that saving souls is a waste of time, because we have no souls to save. Why? Because if we admire Mother Teresa, we are saying at some level of our being that we recognize how we ought to be more like her – which is to say, more like Christ, Whom she served. Mother Teresa showed and taught compassion to the outcasts of the earth, the most wretched human beings – reached out and actually touched them. How much easier it is to write a check to an organization, to let someone else help the hopeless, the poor, the damaged… how much easier it is to keep a safely sanitary distance between us and them. So Bill Gates is a much safer moral hero than Mother Teresa. He lets us keep our materialistic goals – make billions of dollars! be envied and powerful! – while tacking on the self-satisfaction of “doing good” by spending some of that money on the faceless needy. Of course we want to have Bill Gates as our hero instead of Mother Teresa. Except that our hearts know that Mother Teresa is more admirable.

Of course we want to say that “who we are” is a side issue from “what we do.” Who we are is expressed in every word we say, every relationship we have, every decision we make. And so “who we are” lies at the very root of what we do. Can God take our actions and turn them to good, even if they come from the wrong source? Of course He can. That doesn’t excuse us from taking responsibility for ourselves. It is so much easier to say that what we believe is unimportant, as long as we do what’s right. But in the end, we act as we believe. We cannot do otherwise. And that is why we admire Mother Teresa – in what she did, we could see who she was, and see that she was admirable.

And the last conclusion – that material well-being is more important than spiritual health – that is the conclusion that our culture relentlessly pushes for. We are in a culture of more, more, more; a culture of always wanting more. But are we content? How much peace do we have? Real peace, real happiness? As I look around, I see people who are hungry, who are starving in the midst of plenty, trying to fill the empty places in their souls with all the wrong things. I know what that feels like that – I was there for many years, trying to either ignore the hunger, deny it, or fill it with things. But material well-being can come at too high a cost. It can come at the cost of our souls; certainly it can come at the cost of pain, of denying our true needs, of death of the self.

Of course our culture wants to venerate Bill Gates – his path to doing good takes us along the path of wanting more, getting more, wanting more, with the promise of feeling better just around the corner. But that’s the real illusion. And when we admire Mother Teresa, even just a little bit, we are experiencing not a “moral illusion” but a glimpse of the truth: that our happiness, our wholeness, lies with One Who is more than anything we can do or get on our own.

Related posts:

1. Good News, Bad News
2. The Personhood of God
3. A Closer Look at Science vs. Faith

It’s not an easy task to produce a program on the Bible that will appeal equally to skeptics and believers. The A&E series The Mysteries of the Bible takes a shot at the project, giving us twenty-two episodes exploring the events described in the Bible and drawing on a variety of points of view about the material. How successful is it? I’d say that The Mysteries of the Bible is not terribly ambitious, but it does succeed in doing what it (modestly) sets out to do.

In terms of perspective, The Mysteries of the Bible takes a middle-of-the-road approach. Scholars and religious figures provide their thoughts on the meaning of the material; some take a skeptical approach, while others cautiously assert the orthodox view. I was pleased to note that all the interviewees are given enough time to articulate their views properly; while the interview clips are always fairly brief, there’s none of the sound-bite abbreviation that plagues some documentaries. Whatever the point of view being presented, the expert in question gets to explain his or her thought reasonably completely. I’d have liked to have heard more from all of them, to get a fuller explanation of their ideas rather than just the summary, but I recognize that’s not very likely to happen in a 45-minute episode, and at least I did always get the sense that the experts were fairly represented in their views. Overall, the program handles difficult questions by tossing it back at the viewer with a “Hey! Who knows?” kind of approach… but that’s a refreshing change from dogmatism, at least.

The Mysteries of the Bible Collection covers figures and events from both the Old Testament and the New Testament, providing a buffet, as it were, of interesting bits from the Bible. From the Old Testament, we get episodes on “Abraham: One Man, One God,” “The Ten Commandments,” “Jacob’s Ladder,” “Joseph, Master of Dreams,” “Cain and Abel,” “Queen Esther,” “King Solomon,” “King David: Poet Warrior,” and “Prophets: Soul Catchers.” New Testament topics include “Herod the Great,” “Jesus: Holy Child,” “The Execution of Jesus,” “The Lost Years of Jesus,” “The Last Supper,” “Paul the Apostle,” and “Apocalypse: The Puzzle of Revelation.” Episodes related mainly to the Bible in history include “Archenemy: The Philistines,” “The Last Revolt,” and “The Bible’s Greatest Secrets.” Lastly, a few more general topics include “Biblical Angels,” “Heaven and Hell,” and “Magic and Miracles.” The episodes are in apparently random order, but since the episode titles are straightforward it’s easy enough to pick and choose your own path through the material here.

The episodes are tastefully made. Rather than relying on re-enactments (though there are a few brief ones), the episodes are largely illustrated by images from religious art. Since historically there’s an amazing depth and variety of artwork illustrating events from the Bible, this gives the program a lot of beautiful images to accompany the narrative. Archaeological evidence is brought up whenever it’s relevant, with ruins and artifacts displayed. The voiceover narrators (Richard Kiley for the general narration and Jean Simmons for quotations from the Bible) do a nice job.

As far as the depth of the material goes… It’s fairly introductory. I found the episodes to be moderately informative, but I was always hoping for a bit more depth, a bit more information, a bit more substance in general. Anyone who’s moderately well-read in the Bible will probably find this to be too much of a retread, but it’s not a bad introduction or overview of the topics.

The Mysteries of the Bible Collection doesn’t break any new ground, but it does provide a moderately interesting overview of interesting pieces of the Bible from a reasonably neutral point of view. While it doesn’t have a lot of substance to it, it does cover a lot of cultural ground that’s just plain useful to know in order to appreciate a lot of Western art and literature. I’d recommend it particularly to families with children, to watch and discuss together.

Read the full review here at DVDTalk.com.

Related posts:

1. Reasonable Faith in an Uncertain World: Conference Report
2. The Personhood of God
3. Salvation on the Street (Fair)

I’ve reviewed some bad documentaries in my time. In 900-odd reviews to date, some of the stuff I’ve popped into the DVD player has turned out to be real dreck. I’ve seen many “controversial” programs and many more that took mildly speculative stuff and puffed it up with a hefty dose of sensationalism. I’ve seen topics that I really liked butchered by poor argument and ineffective presentation. So it really means something when I say that The Lost Tomb of Jesus is, by far, the worst documentary that I’ve ever forced myself to sit through.

Why worst?

Not in the choice of topic: let’s get that straight to begin with. People have enjoyed spinning far-out stories about Christianity for about two thousand years. We’ve seen a post-Da Vinci Code surge of breathless conspiracy theories, some of which have made for interesting documentary filmmaking (Digging for the Truth handled the topic solidly, with only a mild sprinkling of sensationalism, for instance.) I don’t believe that there’s any topic that should be “off limits”: no matter what, everything is going to offend someone, and even a relatively blown-out-of-proportion piece can have the beneficial effect of stimulating viewer interest in a worthwhile subject (in this case, the historical origins of Christianity).

So no, The Lost Tomb of Jesus doesn’t offend me in the slightest by its premise. But I have to admit, the film did offend me, deeply – as a rational, thinking person. You see, I’m an honest intellectual and a great believer in knowing the truth. I think that it’s a good thing to really think through what you believe (one way or the other) and base your conclusions on real evidence and solid reasoning. That’s where The Lost Tomb of Jesus hits a nerve for me.

I have never, and I mean never, seen a documentary that so deliberately and consistently uses circular reasoning, ad hominem attacks, unfounded assertions, straw-man arguments, and general poor reasoning. One of the subjects that I teach in college is critical thinking, and The Lost Tomb of Jesus offers a blow-by-blow exposition of logic and reason being twisted until it screams for mercy. (Presumably the screams were dubbed over in the final edit.)

To begin with, The Lost Tomb of Jesus uses a quick sleight-of-hand to establish the premise. What if, we are asked, the family of Jesus took his body from the tomb to re-bury somewhere else? That’s swiftly taken as a given, and then we’re off to find the tomb. But hold on: the film never takes the time to establish that it’s a worthwhile theory. Why would the family even want to re-bury Jesus in a different tomb, given that the wealthy Joseph of Arimathea had already donated a tomb (which he wouldn’t have needed to do if the family of Jesus had a tomb ready for use, incidentally), and Jesus’ body had already been taken there and wrapped, with expensive spices and all? The documentary also assumes that Jesus’ family participated in this burial and later re-burial of Jesus’ bones in an ossuary (bone box). But if they’d done that, then all of them would have known, conclusively, that Jesus had not been bodily resurrected as the Gospels state. How, then, can we explain that James, one of Jesus’ brothers, who had been a skeptic during Jesus’ life, became after Jesus’ death one of the most powerful proponents of the resurrected Jesus? If he’d really seen Jesus’ body being re-buried (and later, his bones packed in an ossuary) that would have reinforced his skepticism, not caused a complete turn-around. Does The Lost Tomb of Jesus deal with these issues? It doesn’t even acknowledge them, which for me was a first strike against its intellectual honesty.

I could forgive this beginning, if that was the extent of the logic-twisting, but it’s not: the arguments throughout The Lost Tomb of Jesus are so consistently circular as to cause dizziness. Try this one on for size: Scholars have concluded, based on the evidence, that a particular tomb and ossuary belonged to Caiaphas, a key figure in Jesus’ trial. Therefore, it is possible to find tombs of major figures, and tombs are uncovered all the time in Jerusalem. Therefore, it would be no surprise to find the tomb of Jesus. Therefore… the tomb that is being discussed is likely to be the tomb of Jesus. In this argument, it’s assumed that Jesus’ tomb exists (and therefore it’s just a matter of time to find it) and that assumption is used as part of the very argument about the existence of the tomb. The Caiaphas tomb is actually completely irrelevant to the question, but it’s drawn in as “evidence” for what is really still just an unsubstantiated claim.

I lost count of the number of times that untested assumptions are used as evidence for further assertions. For instance, it’s an assumption, not a fact, that there even was a family tomb for Jesus’ family. And yes, it’s possible. (Though in my view, unlikely; Jesus came from a working-class family, and it was the wealthy who had rock tombs – remember how Joseph of Arimathea had to donate his tomb? That would have been to save Jesus’ body from being buried in a common grave with other paupers.) But even if we grant this assumption, and then further grant the assumption that the tomb the filmmakers are focusing on is that family tomb, that’s still not evidence that Jesus was ever there. Jesus was the one raised from the dead, not the whole family!

Then there’s the (mis)use of New Testament evidence. The New Testament is actually a rich and reliable source of evidence, having been written within a few decades (or even as close as a few years, for some parts) of the events described. In the context of ancient documents, that’s amazing: it’s practically on-the-spot reportage. And in fact The Lost Tomb of Jesus uses information from the Gospels to advance its argument, sometimes relying on just a few references to prove a point. That’s perfectly fine – except that as soon as the New Testament material would point in a different direction than the filmmakers’ argument, they switch tactics. The lack of details about Mary Magdalen in the New Testament is used as an argument that she was really the most important disciple: theoretically the writers of the New Testament were suppressing the mention of important women to serve their patriarchal ideology. (Never mind that women actually play key roles in the Gospels, cutting against the cultural biases of the day.)

One of the ossuaries in the so-called Jesus tomb is listed as being that of “Judas son of Jesus.” That would seem to be evidence that we’re looking at a different Jesus, right? After all, every piece of information we have about Jesus indicates that he was unmarried and did not father a child. But wait! The Lost Tomb of Jesus can make even this contrary fact work into its theory: see, this son of Jesus was kept so secret that we have no record of him! Therefore, the absence of information about this son is evidence that the son really existed… and therefore the presence of “Judas son of Jesus” in the tomb is supporting evidence for it really being Jesus of Nazareth’s tomb! Is your head spinning yet? Uh, guys – either the New Testament is a reliable document, or it’s not. I’m fine with the filmmakers taking either approach, but they can’t have it both ways, the better to suit whatever direction they want to take their argument in.

Let’s not overlook the factual or interpretive faux pas, of which we have several. First, according to the documentary, the Church fathers in the second century did a lot of “suppressing” of other Christian texts, presumably as part of a conspiracy to wipe out the truth. Suppression? No – canonization. For quite a while after the founding of Christianity, there were a number of gospels and letters in circulation among the new Christian community. Eventually the leaders of the Church met and, over time, decided which ones should form part of the New Testament. Some made the cut, and some didn’t. That’s selection, not suppression. What’s in a word? Quite a lot, really. It means that we shouldn’t look at the non-canonical material as being somehow better or more authoritative than what made it into the New Testament, but the opposite. The early Church leaders weren’t dummies: they knew that the best texts were the ones that were the eye-witness ones or ones that were based on eye-witness testimony…. so we get Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, and a selection of key letters from people who knew and worked with Jesus. What we don’t get is something like the Acts of Philip, which is a third- or fourth-century work, and therefore hundreds of years removed from the material it was talking about. It’s less reliable, not more… but it’s on the Acts of Philip that The Lost Tomb of Jesus draws when it tries to work Mary Magdalen into the Jesus tomb story.

Then we get into the morass of early Christian symbolism. The film acknowledges that crosses weren’t used as a Christian symbol until about the fourth century (true)… but then goes on to argue that maybe people were using cross symbols before then, and therefore the presence of a cross-like mark on one of the ossuaries indicates that it belonged to Jesus. That’s not so much of a stretch as it is a vast and completely unwarranted leap. The Lost Tomb of Jesus tries to justify this claim by saying that there’s no evidence for early Christianity, its practices or symbolism, until after it’s legalized by Constantine… which is just flat-out wrong. The catacombs in Rome, for instance, supply plenty of evidence of early Christian symbolism (which includes imagery of fish, anchors, ships, sheep, peacocks, among other things – but not the cross), not to mention the symbols that appear in the New Testament itself. What is that cross mark? A mason’s mark.

A big deal is also made of the tomb’s location, halfway between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, which are claimed to be the two most important cities to Jesus’ family: a perfect spot for the family tomb, right? There are lots of problems with that. First, when you locate a family tomb, you typically put it in the important town, not halfway between it and some other place. Next, Bethlehem is pretty low on the list of important locations. Jesus was born there, but only because Joseph and Mary were on the road to register at the census. He actually grew up in Nazareth. Last, the list of “important locations” related to Jesus is so long that pretty much any spot in Israel is bound to be halfway between two of them. In other words, this tomb’s location doesn’t prove anything… except that it’s actually not where we’d expect it to be (Nazareth).

But hold on – doesn’t The Lost Tomb of Jesus give other, opposing scholars a chance to rebut the film’s theories? Yes, and… definitely no. After spinning out the what-ifs, could-haves, and it’s-possibles to make a particular claim, the film does cut briefly to a few scholars stating that they don’t agree. And that’s it. We don’t get to hear their arguments; we don’t get to hear their evidence. They’re whisked in to give the pretense of balance and swiftly whisked off again. The only critical expert who’s given more than a 10-second sound bite is the curator of the Israel Museum, who tries valiantly to curtail the flights of fancy of the filmmakers. But the main discussion between the curator and Simcha Jacobovici displays the opposite of fair and balanced treatment. The curator’s explanations are cut off, and Simcha Jacobovici takes a hostile, belligerent tone towards him, almost as if he’s trying to provoke him. (The curator remains calm but is visibly frustrated, very understandably.) The show of disrespect for anyone with a different interpretation of the material is consistent throughout the program, in fact. It’s stated outright that anyone who doesn’t buy into the film’s premises is biased by being reluctant to even consider the subject; it’s implied that there’s a conspiracy of scholars to validate other New Testament finds, but not to investigate anything related to Jesus. (Anyone who thinks that has never encountered the publish-or-perish mentality of academia. Finding Jesus’ genuine tomb would guarantee tenure for some underpaid professor of archaeology or theology somewhere!)

Finally, I also found the whole “search for the tomb” to be both disingenuous and appalling. Disingenuous, because re-discovering the original tomb at Talpiot really has very little to contribute to the topic. The tomb had been mapped; the ossuaries had been removed and cataloged, and were on view; there’s no real reason given as to why it’s useful at all to find it again. Kind of cool, sure – but not essential. Then there’s the search for the second tomb… which becomes “evidence” in an interesting way: this second tomb is connected to Jesus, because it’s located next to another tomb that is potentially the tomb of Jesus. Hypothesis taken as fact, once again. What this part of the program actually does is serve as an Indiana-Jones-style adventure, one that gathers its own momentum: if we get caught up in the excitement, we’re quite likely to forget that finding and entering the tomb doesn’t prove the filmmakers’ proposition.

That covers disingenuous: what about appalling? I was horrified by the cavalier attitude the filmmakers took to doing archaeology. There’s no indication that the team was composed of professional archaeologists, and they’re not associated with any university or research project; their approach is just to do whatever it takes to find what they want (including calling in a plumber, at one point, to knock through some blockages en route to looking into a tomb). In short, these guys are practically looters. I found the overall sense of disrespect for Jerusalem’s archaeological treasures to be distressing. Anything goes, as long as it makes great film footage, right?

I could go on – some of the logical twists are so absurd as to be even laughable. But there’s really not much point. The entire film is a conspiracy-theory engine, pulling up anything and everything as fuel. Any one of these logical faux pas could be forgivable by itself: after all, I expected a certain amount (that is, a lot) of sensationalism to begin with. But what we actually get is a consistent disregard for logical, evidence-based argument; it’s a slap in the face to any viewer who actually uses his or her brain.

It’s also far from unbiased, although it claims to be (and it certainly whips out the “biased” card to pre-emptively stop any rebuttal). One of the main participants claims that the film is taking a “strictly historical approach,” so its methods and conclusions must be valid. Except that it’s not: it’s assuming as settled the very question that lies at the heart of the topic. The film assumes that Jesus was not bodily resurrected, and therefore his body (and tomb) must be out there somewhere, waiting to be found. The possibility that there is no tomb because there is no body is discounted as something that people just believe, in the teeth of the evidence, as it were. This neatly sidesteps the fact that the fundamental claim of Christianity is a historical one: that Jesus died and was resurrected, and that the reason the disciples were willing to die on the basis of that claim was that they knew it to be true, based on what they’d seen with their own eyes. However, the film avoids considering that possibility as an explanation for the events surrounding Jesus’ death. Note that I’m not objecting to the filmmakers’ conclusions, but rather to their unwillingness to tackle the counter-argument. But even though I’d have liked to have the counter-arguments placed on the table for fair discussion, the film’s sidestepping of the issues doesn’t surprise or bother me. That, I expected.

What I find objectionable that the viewing public is being presented with something that feels so fundamentally cynical and manipulative. It’s not just a house of cards, it’s a mean-spirited one that devalues opposing points of view and insults the viewer by consistently twisting logic and evidence for its own purposes. I’ve seen plenty of speculative documentaries that I was perfectly OK with, but this is the first time that I felt that I wanted to wash my brain after watching a program.

Read the full review on DVDTalk here.

For a fuller exposition of the actual facts behind this program, read anthropologist Joe Zias’ excellent Viewer’s Guide to Understanding the Talpiot Tomb Documentary.

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2. Thank You, Lord Jesus
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With the feature film The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe having been such a success, it’s no wonder there’s a renewal of interest in filmed versions of other books in CS Lewis’ Narnia series. What’s nice about this release on DVD of the BBC production of The Silver Chair is that it’s been handled right: released with remastered video and sound, so that the 1990 production appears on its best footing.

The Silver Chair is actually the fourth volume in the Chronicles of Narnia: following The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Prince Caspian, and The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’. (As a fantasy scholar – I did my Ph.D. dissertation on the fantasy novel – let me assure you that this really is the correct ordering of the volumes. The peculiar re-ordering of the Chronicles to put The Magician’s Nephew first instead of as #6 is something that was done after Lewis’ death, based on a rather spurious interpretation of an off-hand comment he made to a child in a letter, in which he commented that it was fine to re-read them in internal chronological order. The original publication order – which has The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe first – is in narrative terms definitely the best way to read them the first time.)

In any case, The Silver Chair introduces us to a new set of protagonists: Jill Pole and Eustace Scrubb, rather than the four Pevensie children. Eustace has already been a character in a Narnia story – he plays a significant role in The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’ – but it’s not necessary to know that part of the backstory to enjoy The Silver Chair. Here, Jill and Eustace are unexpectedly brought into Narnia, where they’re given the task of rescuing the missing Prince Rillian, heir to the Narnian throne. It’s a classic fairy-tale story, given a characteristically original and fresh CS Lewis treatment: the events and places the children encounter have enough echoes in folklore and fairy-tale to have depth, while also being new and creative.

Lewis’ straightforward narrative style translates into film fairly readily; we don’t get as much insight into the characters’ internal development as we do in the original book (even in his short children’s books Lewis is good at giving psychological depth to characters) but the events of the story itself unfold pretty nearly as they do in the original. The BBC production of The Silver Chair is fairly long, at 155 minutes, but with the variety of scenes and encounters in the story, it never feels slow and is sure to interest young viewers. The settings range from the modern school where Jill and Eustace start out, to the marshes where they meet Puddleglum the Marsh-wiggle, to the giants’ castle, to the underground world of the Emerald Witch: all distinctive and nicely realized locations that move the story along in an interesting way. I was pleased overall with the fidelity of the film to Lewis’ story; for instance, the key scene in which the Emerald Witch tries to convince the children that “Narnia” is just a dream is given nearly in its entirety. That’s a good thing to see, because it’s really the central point of the whole book; while I don’t think that it’s handled quite as well as it could have been in terms of capturing the scene from the book, it does provide the viewer with the key insight that it’s not just the Witch’s magical powers that are dangerous, but more so her manipulation of the children’s conceptions of reality. The make-or-break moment is Puddleglum’s declaration that “I shall live like a Narnian, even if there is no Narnia,” which is pulled off nicely by the solid actor who plays Puddleglum.

Let’s face it, though – one question on any viewer’s mind is going to be the special effects. Are they acceptably plausible? The short answer is yes, they are. We’re all so spoiled by lavish CGI at this point that it’s easy to be overly picky, so let’s get the downsides out of the way. OK, there are a few rather dreadful moments in The Silver Chair. There’s a giant rubber snake at one point that can only be described as lamentable. A few stuffed hedgehogs on the fringes of an early scene are best ignored. Aslan is… well, the problem is that if you know and love the character of Aslan, and know who he’s supposed to be, it’s a bit difficult to take an awkward, static stuffed lion as Aslan. All in all, though, Aslan-the-stuffed-lion could be a lot worse, and he’s only in a couple of scenes.

For the most part, though, the special effects and costuming in The Silver Chair are nicely done and not that dated. Unlike some of the other Narnia stories, The Silver Chair takes place mostly among human or human-looking creatures, rather than talking animals, so the major problem of weird-looking fake animals is simply not an issue. The filmmakers made the excellent decision to make Puddleglum look more human than the way that he’s described in the book… thus avoiding the cheesiness factor entirely. They also cast a solid actor in the role, which helps quite a bit. The giants are handled nicely as well, coming across as quite convincingly gigantic. All the rest of the sets, costumes, and special effects in the story look fine; some are just OK, but others are quite impressive.

In the end, The Silver Chair works quite well as a filmed production for children, one that’s true to Lewis’ story while also providing an engaging visual experience. It’s a fun story with a solid core of meaning to it, told with engaging characters and interesting action. The overall production may not be as polished as the eventual silver-screen version we’ll probably get one of these days, but it’s faithful to the original book and is very likely to please both young viewers and their parents.

Originally written for DVDTalk.com. Read the full review here.

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Treasures of Sacred Art: Tuscan Journeys takes viewers on an extensive tour through the Christian art and architecture of Tuscany, from Florence to Siena to Pisa and more. It’s quite an extensive set, with 30 half-hour episodes over six DVDs; the question is, is it worth spending the time on this Tuscan journey? The answer depends on what you’re looking for.

Tuscan Journeys is essentially a set of filmed museum visits, loosely tied together by tourist wanderings from one town to the next. In many of the locations visited in the program, the episode does in fact literally take the viewer on a tour through a museum: many of the churches in Tuscany have small art collections or associated mini-museums for the public. Even in the locations that aren’t literally museums, the programs take a museum-tour-like approach, wandering through the area and stopping to admire the works of art as they’re come upon.

The result is that Tuscan Journeys is both very rich and very shallow, at the same time. The richness comes from the sheer quantity of amazing art that we get to see: in churches, cathedrals, monasteries, abbeys, and so on, we see sculpture, decoration, frescoes, and paintings from master after master. Clearly, the patrimony of Christian art in Tuscany is incredible, and in its 15 hours, Tuscan Journeys fits quite a lot of it in.

The shallowness, though, comes from the fact that the museum-visit approach gives us, the viewers, very little information about the masterpieces of art that we’re viewing. Yes, the voiceover tells us who painted such-and-such a piece, and offers some words of appreciation, but that’s about it. We don’t get any information about the history behind the pieces, how the different compositions relate to each other or how the artistic traditions developed, or any real sense of how these pieces – so important to the life of their day – fit into the culture. The narrator will make comments such as remarking that such-and-such a fresco is “very interesting”… and then leave it at that. Interesting in what way? More interesting than the other pieces, for what reason? We aren’t told! It’s a frustrating experience, because it ends up reducing all these masterpieces to “pretty things to look at”; these incredibly moving and powerful pieces of religious art lose much of their power by being so thoroughly out of context. (In general, the script is not a marvel of good writing. For example, at one point, an impressive cathedral is referred to – apparently in praise – as a “Gothic mastodon.”)

That’s not to say that we can’t develop a great aesthetic appreciation for a piece of art unless we know how it fits into history; in fact, the beauty of many of the pieces of art and architecture displayed in Tuscan Journeys is precisely how they transcend history to touch us even in the modern day and in a different culture. But to develop that kind of appreciation, we’d need to spend sufficient time looking at a particular piece: observing it, responding to it, absorbing its details and developing an overall emotional and intellectual reaction to it. That, in fact, is what a person can do on his or her own in a museum: sit down on one of those benches and look at a particular piece for a sustained period of time. However, Tuscan Journeys puts viewers in the position of being guests on a guided tour, pausing before each piece briefly and then shuttling the group to the next one. In that sense, if the program wasn’t going to provide much information about the pieces, at least it should have presented fewer pieces – something that’s counter-intuitive, perhaps.

I suspect that another issue with Tuscan Journeys is that it was created originally with an Italian audience in mind, certainly not an American one. The voiceover narration is peppered with “everyone knows…” comments that clearly refer to information that this well-educated American reviewer certainly did not know. There’s an implied assumption that viewers are already familiar with the artists displayed here, their importance, and their cultural background. If I had that background, I’m sure that I’d have enjoyed Tuscan Journeys a lot more. Unfortunately, I was interested in the program precisely because I don’t know a lot about Christian art and architecture in Tuscany, and I wanted to know about it. Tuscan Journeys let me see a lot of it, but I can’t say as I know a whole lot more about it than when I started. That’s a shame, since the art truly is magnificent.

Originally written for DVDTalk.com. Read the full review here.

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1. Worship Him in the Beauty of Holiness: Church Art, Architecture, and Worship
2. Bach at 30,000 Feet: Does Accessibility Diminish the Value of Art?
3. Undeserved Gifts

Barabbas picks up the story of early Christianity right about where Ben-Hur leaves it. Both Jesus and a thief named Barabbas (Anthony Quinn) are slated to be executed by crucifixion; by popular acclaim, one of them is set free. Barabbas, the freed man, finds himself haunted by guilt over having had another man die in his place, especially when he discovers that many of the people around him, including a former lover, have become followers of the new faith of Christianity. As years pass, and after surviving various arrests and incarcerations, slave labor, and fighting as a gladiator, Barabbas himself becomes tormented both by guilt and by the idea that he cannot die.

In the possibly-deathless figure of Barabbas, there’s the gem of an interesting story. For one thing, Barabbas experiences a number of interesting situations during his life as a robber, a slave, and finally a gladiator, any of which could be prime material for an adventure story in the vein of Ben-Hur. There’s also the potential for interesting character development: Barabbas is constantly caught between his own natural skepticism and the superstition of those around him. Although the people around him are eager to leap to supernatural conclusions about his longevity, Barabbas’ continued life has much more to do with his intelligent, canny behavior than any unnatural force. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t adequately explore either of these possibilities.

What Barabbas ends up as is little more than an episodic sequence of pro-Christian messages. Two similarly themed films, Ben-Hur (even subtitled “A Tale of the Christ”) and The Ten Commandments, manage to incorporate a religious message in a way that’s not heavy-handed, because in both of those films, there’s a strong, entertaining storyline as the backbone of the film. In Barabbas, the storyline is the message and the message is the storyline, which significantly weakens its overall quality as a film.

Even with this weakness, the film could have redeemed itself with a strong focus on characterization instead of plot, but in fact characterization is one of the weaker elements of this film. Barabbas meets many people over the course of the story, but apart from Barabbas himself, all the characters seem like cardboard cut-outs who make speeches. The character of Barabbas seems untouched by these people and their messages, which makes the ending of the film highly implausible, when Barabbas is moved to action and a change of heart after seeing a Christian friend die.

The best part of the film is a segment that falls into the sub-genre of “gladiator school episodes in film.” The representation of a Roman colosseum in action, with various “acts” going on simultaneously, is the most accurate historical representation that I’ve seen in film of this kind of event, even more so than in Spartacus or Gladiator. The scenes dealing with Barabbas’ training as a gladiator, as well as the actual fights, are also very well done and entertaining; it’s a pity that the rest of the movie doesn’t match them.

Originally written for DVDTalk. Read the full review here.

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The Cadfael Chronicles, a BBC production also shown in the U.S. on Mystery!, features Derek Jacobi as Brother Cadfael, a monk in the twelfth-century British abbey of Shrewsbury. Life in medieval times was far from simple, and human nature was no different then than it is now; the sharp-witted and wise Cadfael finds himself untangling many a twisted tale involving love, hate, vengeance, and murder. Cadfael Set 3 offers three seventy-five-minute episodes from the series’ third year, originally aired in 1997.

Each of the episodes is based on one of the Cadfael novels written by Ellis Peters; they’re fairly similar in tone, and feature a recurring supporting cast around Derek Jacobi in the title role. Viewers who have enjoyed earlier Cadfael seasons will certainly find this set to their liking; for those who are unfamiliar with the series, I’ll give a quick evaluation of each of the three discs in the set.

A Morbid Taste for Bones, based on Ellis Peters’ first Cadfael novel (originally published in 1977) is the best of the three. Prompted by the visions of one of the monks, Cadfael and his holy brothers set off to Wales to “rescue” the bones of a Welsh saint, for the greater glory of their monastery. But as it turns out, the Welsh people are far from eager to give up their saint to a bunch of English strangers, and when recriminations turn to murder, Cadfael must view even his own fellow monks as potential killers. I found A Morbid Taste for Bones to be my favorite of the Cadfael episodes I’ve seen; it has a more engaging story than some of the others, maybe because it is a little different in storyline, or because it is set in a different location. Some of the events in this episode give an entirely new and ironic light on later events that take place in other, later episodes, though it’s perfectly possible to enjoy those episodes without having seen this one.

The Rose Rent, based on Peters’ 1986 novel, takes viewers back to home territory at Shrewsbury Abbey. A tangled plot of love and greed develops around a young widow and her gift to the abbey of the house she once shared with her late husband. She requires only a “rose rent” of one rose from the house’s garden each year, but as it turns out, someone is willing to kill to stop the rose rent and with it, her connection to the past. It’s reasonably entertaining, though I do wish that Cadfael would stumble across a mystery that didn’t involve a murder once in a while.

The Raven in the Foregate is also based on a novel written in 1986. This time, when a body turns up, it strikes at the heart of the abbey itself: the victim is the new parish priest, admittedly a rather unlikeable fellow who managed to alienate the townspeople by scorning an unwed mother and her child. The Raven in the Foregate is more dependent than most episodes on the viewer having a familiarity with the series, as the recurring characters from the abbey have a larger role than usual in the story.

Originally written for DVDTalk. Read the full review here.

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