Saw this quote in the review of the new movie, “The Golden Compass” – it’s in a discussion of the economics of making movies with overtly religious messages:
“New Line made a bid [for financial success] with The Nativity Story in 2006, a prequel to The Passion. It bombed.”
So much information about the interaction between faith and culture is present in that one sentence.
At least, perhaps unknowingly, the author got something fundamentally right – the Nativity is a prequel to the Passion.
I think I’ll need to pray on it for a while.
Read the rest here.
John Donne preached a Christmas sermon in which he made a similar observation:
“The whole life of Christ was a continual Passion; others die martyrs but Christ was born a martyr. He found a Golgotha even in Bethleham; for to his tenderness then the straws were almost as the thorns after, the manger as uneasy at first as his cross was at last. His birth and his death were but one continual act, and his Christmas day and his Good Friday are but the evening and morning of one and the same day.”
(New Line made a bid with “The Nativity Story” in 2006, a prequel to “The Passion”. It bombed.) Sorry, I can’t figure out how to do italics here, but I think the “Passion” reference is to the Mel Gibson film.
Hi Julian –
Yes. My wonderment comes at the way the statement by the reviewer can be read as both a comment on the economics of the film industry and an insight into what he knows or doesn’t know about theology…
It’s also an interesting comment about taste. I’ve just finished reading Damon Linker’s piece entitled “Athiesm’s Wrong Turn” in this week’s New Republic. While I’ve not read the Pullman books (though I likely will now), it seems to me they may be characterized by the sort of illiberal atheism that Linker finds in Dawkins, Hitchings, etc. On the other hand, I think the popularity of the Pullman books may have something to do a kind of spirituality that’s popular now in which religious symbols have become free-floating icons. I’m going to post something about this on my blog later in the week. Tonight I’m meeting my non-traditional Great Books class at Saint Louis University. I know that many of my students have read the Pullman books and that some of my students are religious. I’m going to as them to educate me.