{"id":69373,"date":"2019-01-19T09:25:33","date_gmt":"2019-01-19T16:25:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=69373"},"modified":"2019-01-19T23:46:51","modified_gmt":"2019-01-20T06:46:51","slug":"day-of-judgment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2019\/01\/day-of-judgment.html","title":{"rendered":"“Day of Judgment”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Touching,<\/a>
The grave monument of Matthew Stanford Robison (1988-1999) in the Salt Lake City Cemetery<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The most recent iteration of the regular bi-weekly Hamblin-Peterson column in the Deseret News<\/em> is now up:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe last god-king\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The accompanying photos, taken recently by Bill Hamblin, are really nice.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cElder Christofferson Shares Why Watergate Made Him Question His Profession: \u2018It Was Like a Punch to the Gut'\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat Happened After Nonmembers Were Asked to Read One Page of the Book of Mormon and Look for Jesus Christ\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe temple in Italy is already a point of curiosity in Rome \u2014 and that\u2019s a good thing\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cLatter-day Saint Sculptor Shares How He\u2019s Helped Thousands See the Beauty in the Rome Italy Visitors\u2019 Center\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

On Friday evening, my wife and I attended a screening, in BYU\u2019s International Cinema series, of the 2018 Egyptian film Yomeddine<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>\u2014\u00a0<\/em>\u201cDay of Judgment\u201d (\u064a\u0648\u0645 \u0627\u0644\u062f\u064a\u0646), the title of which I myself would have transliterated as yawm al-d\u012bn<\/em>, and which is to be pronounced roughly yome ad-DEEN<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an emotionally understated but still moving film about a terribly scarred Christian leper who lives in a compound somewhere in \u201cthe North\u201d of Egypt and earns his living by retrieving potentially reuseable trash from the nearby \u201cGarbage Hill.\u201d \u00a0(In Egypt, it\u2019s commonly extremely poor Christians who work in the city dumps.) \u00a0He sets out southward with his donkey and his cart to find his family in the provincial Upper Egyptian city of Qena \u2014 his father had left him at the door of the leper colony many years before, when he was just a boy \u2014 and is soon joined by a ten-year old Nubian Muslim orphan whom he had befriended.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

My wife was especially impressed by the fact that the film doesn\u2019t sentimentalize the people in it, doesn\u2019t make them pathetic or pitiable. \u00a0Alongside Beshay, the leper, and \u201cObama,\u201d the orphan \u2014 who, since he didn\u2019t know his real name, took this new name from \u201cthe guy on TV\u201d \u2014 important roles are also played in the film by a dwarf and by a former truck driver who lost his legs following a terrible accident caused by a spoiled young rich man who was speeding in a new car while on drugs, and who now begs every day on a street corner in the provincial city of Sohag. \u00a0And these aren\u2019t professional actors, made to look like disabled, disadvantaged people. \u00a0They\u2019re the real thing.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The title of the film comes from a scene in which the dwarf tells the leper, Beshay, that, in this life, they will never be \u201cnormal,\u201d but that, on\u00a0yawm al-d\u012bn\u00a0<\/em>\u2014 which is synonymous with yawm al-qiy\u0101ma<\/i>, the \u201cday of resurrection\u201d \u2014 everybody will be equal. \u00a0Shortly thereafter, when Beshay and Obama leave their newfound friends in Sohag for the last leg of their journey to Qena, the former truck driver calls out that they\u2019ll see each other again someday (clearly, it won\u2019t be in mortality) and that, when they do, \u201cI\u2019ll have legs!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf there were a God,\u201d an atheist acquaintance once told me online, \u201cI think (s)he\u2019d enjoy hanging out with me \u2014 perhaps sipping on a fine Merlot under the night sky while devising a grand unified theory.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Comfortable, affluent, secure, well-fed, successful, healthy, whole, untouched by major loss or sorrow, he seemed to me, in that comment, to be supremely and thoughtlessly complacent.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

He had won the lottery of life. \u00a0Historically and still today, though, most people haven\u2019t. \u00a0Not even close.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

For them, surely, the understanding that this world, mortality, is all there is, that things will never be any better, would be a terrible thing.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I have never forgotten the obituary notice for Matthew Stanford Robison that appeared in the\u00a0Deseret News\u00a0<\/em>back in 2013:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.deseretnews.com\/article\/682084\/Obituary-Matthew-Stanford-Robison.html<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I can easily understand why some conclude that there is no purpose or meaning to life, no ultimately redemptive hope, and nothing beyond the grave. \u00a0I cannot, however, understand why some of those who draw that conclusion think it such unalloyed good news.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Films like Yomeddine<\/em> can be powerful reminders of what\u2019s at stake.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 The most recent iteration of the regular bi-weekly Hamblin-Peterson column in the Deseret News is now up: \u00a0 \u201cThe last god-king\u201d \u00a0 The accompanying photos, taken recently by Bill Hamblin, are really nice. \u00a0 *** \u00a0 \u201cElder Christofferson Shares Why Watergate Made Him Question His Profession: \u2018It Was Like a Punch to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[870,951,873,1101,1008,2271,2779,1366,1724],"class_list":["post-69373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-christianity","tag-egypt","tag-film","tag-hope","tag-immortality","tag-problem-of-evil","tag-problem-of-pain","tag-resurrection","tag-theodicy"],"yoast_head":"\n"Day of Judgment"<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"    The most recent iteration 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