January 25, 2003

After attending a conference at Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral seven years ago, leaders of the Lutheran Church of the Master in Sylmar, California, started thinking about changing their congregation’s name. The trend of erasing denominational identity from church names had been well under way in the West among independent evangelical and charismatic churches—and with iconoclasts like the famed pastor of the Crystal Cathedral.

When the rains began in Central America in June, Alejandro Fuentes took his nine-year old son, his hair discolored by malnutrition, and walked back and forth across his small farm in the parched south of Honduras. They poked holes in the ground with sharpened sticks, dropping in their last seeds of corn and beans. Fuentes said he prayed with each seed he dropped, asking God to let the rains continue.

"The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Though William Faulkner did not have the Catholic sexual-abuse crisis in mind when he wrote these words, they do throw light on the conflicting responses to the scandals of the past year.

Roman Polanski's The Pianist has been hailed as the filmmaker's long-awaited return to the glorious 1960s and '70s, when he made such films as Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby and especially Chinatown. This analysis is flawed in two respects. First, though he has been working in Europe for the past 25 years--after jumping bail and fleeing the United States on a morals charge--Polanski has continued to turn out small but quirky films filled with his always-alluring visual style.