Let me say right off the top that this post isn’t so much about the movie Exodus as it is about God… and story. Still, I should probably warn, “spoiler alert.” But the two biggies below that might preempt one’s enjoyment of the drama hardly qualify as spoilers, and they bear immediately on the whole …
I was just thinking: wouldn’t it be fun to have a spot to feature artifacts, documents, persons, architecture, anything concrete related to my historical fiction set in ancient Babylon and Persia? Perhaps provide a wee bit of commentary, maybe how the things fit into the story,…? In the absence of any nay-sayers (admittedly none nearby …
Had a great time at Chop Suey Tuey bookstore in Richmond’s Carytown yesterday for Bible Babel‘s paperback debut. In the midst of the excitement of VCU’s big basketball game (on to the Final Four! wow) and the ever-amazing French Film Festival at the historic Byrd Theater, just across the street from Chop Suey Tuey, we filled the …
“What does your book say about evil?,” an attendee posed to panelists at the VA Fest of the Book event that I moderated. It was a lively event, not least because the composition of the panel led inevitably to passionate disagreement. As the psychiatrist who wrote of religion as a product purely of human physiology …
A silent film nearly 100 years old will get a fresh airing complete with new music tonight (March 3) in Baltimore. I have yet to see D. W. Griffith’s “Intolerance,” but I’m intrigued. It tells four different historical moments of intolerance, the first of which deals with the fall of Babylon to Cyrus II. I can’t tell …
Job and Proverbs. Texts from those (very different) biblical books launch the two movies that I’ve seen most recently — Secretariat and True Grit. Stories about determination and perseverance, success in the face of misfortune and seemingly impossibilities. But this wee post isn’t about the movies so much as to note how they begin — with biblical texts, …
It seems that among the least religious are people in European countries that have a religious affiliation. If you’re Swedish, you’re Lutheran… in word, anyway. Last night, I watched the film version of Girl with a Dragon Tattoo. Intense. I’ve heard quite a bit about it, read more, but I don’t remember anyone mentioning that a key clue to unravelling the …
Word has it that the Good Word is jumping on the vampire bus. For all sorts of reasons, it’s not as great a leap as you might think — more on that later… Meanwhile, here’s the scoop: Will Smith as the lead in The Legends of Cain a re-telling of Genesis’ story of the first kids, …
If most people don’t get the biblical references, why do the creators of popular tv, movies, music and lit still use them so much? Pondering this question over iced tea with a novelist, Ph.D.-candidate friend, we decided: it’s tough to say. Here are a couple of ideas that we bounced around: 1) Audiences do recognize the biblical …
Given its title, I figured that the movie would have something to do with demons — a whole, well, legion of them… in full-on “possession” mode. After all, “Legion” is the name of a biblical demoniac, according to the stories in Mark and Luke, because many demons were involved. But in the movie, Michael (our hero-angel gone …
