NEW YORK — Screenwriter Philippa Boyens gets a tired look in her eyes when she recalls the surgery required to turn “The Lord of the Rings” into a movie, even a sprawling trilogy of three-hour movies. “It’s so hard,” she said. “It’s hard, it’s hard, oh God, it’s hard.” One agonizing cut in the screenplay removed a glimpse of the myth behind J.R.R. Tolkien’s 500,000-word epic. In this lost scene, the traitor Saruman is torturing the noble Gandalf. “What,” asks... Read more
Father Mark Pearson can see trouble coming as he walks the sidewalks of Boston. He can see some faces harden after people make eye contact and then see his clerical collar. Some look away in disgust. A few men deliberately switch to a collision course. Pearson said one or two angry pedestrians have spat on him. “If someone is upset, they may find a way to bump into you or give you a shove,” he said. “Then they say sometime... Read more
Researchers at Hartford Seminary’s Institute for Religious Research began with seven different lists of mosques in the United States. They eliminated all duplicates, before attempting to verify the existence of each institution. This produced a list of 1,209 mosques. Interviews at 416 found that about 340 Muslims regularly prayed in a typical mosque, but 1,629 or so might be associated in one way or another with its religious life. Then the researchers did what researchers do — the math. The... Read more
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Tim J. McGuire is a baseball fan, but that wasn’t why he kept a framed Mickey Lolich card on his desk when he was the editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. That baseball card was a gift from a man who applied for one of the newsroom’s top jobs and, here is the twist, did not get it. “But he wrote me a beautiful letter and he remembered that Mickey Lolich was one of my favorite... Read more
It was sometime during the hearings into whether Judge Priscilla Owen was fit to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals that Father John F. Kavanaugh faced a hard question. All 10 Democrats on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee voted against her and killed her recent nomination, even though the Texas Supreme Court Justice received the American Bar Association’s highest ranking. The problem was that she favored restraints on abortion rights, including parental-notification laws. “This was the first time in... Read more
In the beginning, there were the Jesus People. They had long hair and short memories and they emerged from the 1960s with a unique fusion of evangelical faith and pop culture. They loved fellowship, but didn’t like frumpy churches. They trusted their feelings, not traditions. They loved the Bible, but not those old hymnals. So they started writing, performing, recording and selling songs. The Contemporary Christian Music industry was born. And, lo, the counterculture became a corporate culture, one that... Read more
There are still churches left in this land where folks gather every Wednesday night for “prayer meeting,” since they’re convinced God doesn’t just listen on Sundays. Central Church of the Nazarene in Fort Wright, Ky., is that kind of church. Last week, the Rev. Larry Dillon told his mid-week faithful that he felt God wanted them to spend some extra time praying about the sniper attacks near Washington, D.C. “We prayed for the victims and their families,” he said. “We... Read more
They show up for dinner, help with homework, lead the rituals of bedtime and park their butts in the bleachers when their kids are in action. They are heavy on discipline, but also eager to praise. They have been known to spank their children, but they are also more likely to hug them. They certainly take their families to church — early and often. They are totally off the radar screens in Hollywood and elite academia. They are ordinary, faithful,... Read more
NASHVILLE — As a boy in upstate New York, Father Bob Dalton learned how to talk to Italians, Poles, Ukrainians and various other kinds of neighbors. “My Irish mother was always saying, ‘They’re just not our kind of people,’ ” said the 68-year-old priest, hinting at her accent. “But, you know, we learned to get along. … It helped that almost everybody was Catholic.” Before long, Dalton became a priest in the Glenmary Home Mission Society, which works across the... Read more
Sometimes the bishop calls the priest and sometimes the priest calls the bishop. But one way or another, bishops and priests make appointments to meet over two cups of coffee. On one level, it is a meeting between employer and employee. On another, it’s supposed to be an encounter between a father and a son. These days, the atmosphere can get tense. There are questions that must be asked and a bishop has to ask them. “Like any good father,... Read more
Terry Mattingly
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