![An ad for \"Witnesses\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2021\/05\/Screen-Shot-2021-05-12-at-6.35.39-PM.png\")
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Driving southbound on I-15 early this morning, I was pleased to see an advertisement for the Interpreter Foundation\u2019s soon-to premiere theatrical film, Witnesses<\/em>, on an electronic billboard.\u00a0 And just a few hours ago, I saw the same advertisement on an electronic billboard at the corner of University Parkway and State Street \u2014 in other words, at the southwest corner of University Mall \u2014 in Orem.\u00a0 Good grief.\u00a0 It looks as if this thing could really happen.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n If you want it to happen in a theater in your<\/em> community, please (if you haven\u2019t already done so) go to the Witnesses<\/em> film website<\/a> and request it to come.\u00a0 Don\u2019t assume that you live too far out of the \u201cMormon corridor\u201d for that to be possible.\u00a0 The film is already slated to be shown on a few screens in five states beyond Utah and Idaho; there\u2019s nothing written in stone that should, necessarily, prevent it from going still further.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Along with some reading on the nighttime flights, I watched several movies en route to and from Maui.\u00a0 (When I\u2019m really tired but can\u2019t sleep, movies help to pass the time; I get in some of my best viewing on long flights.)\u00a0 I\u2019ll offer brief notes on three of the films that I watched:\u00a0 (1) I\u2019m afraid that I heartily disliked\u00a0The Personal History of David Copperfield.<\/i><\/a>\u00a0 I\u2019m sorry about that, since the cast is quite good and since it has received pretty positive reviews from critics and even from its (small) audience.\u00a0 But there you have it.\u00a0 The movie has some charm and some wit.\u00a0 And, of course, it\u2019s connected (sort of) with Charles Dickens.\u00a0 There\u2019s that.\u00a0 So I\u2019m glad that I watched it, but I won\u2019t watch it again.\u00a0 (2)\u00a0 I very much liked News of the World<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 As usual, Tom Hanks was very good.\u00a0 But I was surprised at how affecting young Helena Zengel was, especially given how few words she spoke (most of them not even in English).\u00a0 (3)\u00a0 I don\u2019t know that it would be appropriate to \u201clike\u201d the 1951 film version<\/a> (or any version) of Tennessee Williams\u2019s 1947 Pulitzer Prize winning play, A Streetcar Named Desire<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 I hadn\u2019t actually seen it for at least a couple of decades.\u00a0 But it\u2019s still shatteringly powerful after all these years.\u00a0 Vivien Leigh is remarkable as Blanche; Marlon Brando is disturbingly thuggish and repugnant as Stanley Kowalski.\u00a0 And I\u2019ve been a fan and an admirer of Elia Kazan<\/a> since I first began to pay real attention to his work shortly after my mission, as the result of a brief undergraduate evening course that I took on classic American cinema.\u00a0 I suppose that the most famous line from the film is Blanche\u2019s \u201cWhoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.\u201d\u00a0 My favorite, though, also spoken by Blanche (but, this time, to Stanley), is this one:\u00a0 \u201cDeliberate cruelty is unforgivable, and the one thing of which I have never, ever, been guilty.\u201d\u00a0 (I don\u2019t think that I ever have, either.)\u00a0 Stanley Kowalski, of course, is the absolute poster boy for deliberate cruelty.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I\u2019m also very pleased to see these two items on the official website of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cLatter-day Saints Express Respect for Muslim Devotion during Ramadan\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cChurch sends Eid Al Fitr Greetings to Muslims around the World: Video message expresses gratitude for example and devotion\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I\u2019ve recently beccome aware of a new Utah-based organization called the\u00a0Baskerville Institute<\/a>, which has been cooperating with the Utah-based Foundation for Religious Diplomacy<\/a>.\u00a0 The two organizations are led, respectively, by my friend Dr. Bahman Baktiari<\/a> and my friend Dr. Charles Randall Paul<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been involved with the Foundation for Religious Diplomacy for a long time.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because I like its approach very much.\u00a0 The goal is to create friendship and greater understanding between different religious viewpoints, including atheism, and referring to differences within religious traditions as well as between them.\u00a0 The aim is not<\/em>\u00a0ecumenical agreement, though (of course) we don\u2019t object<\/em> to such agreement.\u00a0 On the whole, the realistic objective is to further civil and even friendly disagreement.\u00a0 Resptful contestation.\u00a0 As Randy Paul rather cheekily puts it, we want religious adversaries to say to each other \u201cYou\u2019re going to Hell, but I feel really bad about that.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n In order to further this objective, FRD seeks to involve people for interaction who are deeply committed to their respective religious faiths and who would very much like to see others embrace<\/em> their religious faiths.\u00a0 In my experience, this is both quite distinct from the approach usually connected with ecumenism or ecumenicism and also quite a bit more useful.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been involved in ecumenical gatherings on several continents over the course of my long and\u00a0 lamentable life, and I\u2019ve too often seen dialogues between very liberal, even peripheral, members of religious communities \u2014 people who have no real constituency in their own traditions and who, therefore, neither represent their people nor carry people with them.\u00a0 (Within my own Latter-day Saint community, I recall very clearly a prominent (and, so far as I know, \u201cactive\u201d)\u00a0 left-leaning academic who comfortably declared in my hearing that he felt that he had much more in common with fellow liberals in other religious traditions than with conservative members of his\/our own.\u00a0 Frankly, I still find that statement rather shocking, and highly disappointing.)\u00a0 In particular, I remember a Muslim\/Christian\/Jewish \u201ctrialogue\u201d in Jerusalem years back during which I felt obliged at several points to come to the defense \u2013against ordained Catholic clergy \u2014 of the then-pontiff John Paul II.\u00a0 One of the Muslim members of the group later joked to me that, if we ever did such a \u201ctrialogue\u201d again, it would be nice to involve some actual Christian believers.\u00a0 At the end, I proposed that, for a future gathering, we should invite some intelligent, committed Evangelicals.\u00a0 \u201cThere are<\/em> no \u2018intelligent Evangelicals,'\u201d one of the priests responded with a dismissive snort.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n During the previous year\u2019s \u201ctrialogue,\u201d which convened in Graz, Austria, one of the ostensible Christians in our small group (nine each representing Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) \u2014 a prominent theologian, now deceased, from Harvard Divinity School \u2014 had delivered a public evening lecture for a predominantly Muslim audience.\u00a0 His remarks were designed to build bridges with the Muslims, and the technique that he employed was basically to deny Christian belief.\u00a0 His remarks came across as atheistic \u2014 which I don\u2019t think was terribly misleading.\u00a0 I was astonished that the na\u00efve organizer of our trialogue group somehow imagined that those Muslims would enjoy the Harvard professor\u2019s entirely characteristic and entirely predictable approach and that they would find it appealing.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t.\u00a0 Quite the contrary, they were noticeably\u00a0upset<\/em>.\u00a0 To deny the truth of fundamental Christian beliefs is, effectively, to deny the truth of central Islamic<\/em> doctrines, too.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n It scarcely needs saying that FRD\u2019s approach is fundamentally and dramatically different from that kind of \u201cecumenism.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 \u00a0 Driving southbound on I-15 early this morning, I was pleased to see an advertisement for the Interpreter Foundation\u2019s soon-to premiere theatrical film, Witnesses, on an electronic billboard.\u00a0 And just a few hours ago, I saw the same advertisement on an electronic billboard at the corner of University Parkway and State Street \u2014 in 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