November 27, 2007

Those who watched the The War, a documentary about World War II by Ken Burns which aired on PBS this fall, could feel the horror of battle with a foot soldier from Mobile, Alabama; understand the pressure on a newspaper editor in Luverne, Minnesota, who worked as if victory depended on him; and feel the anxiety of a mother coping with the government’s rationing program.

A self-described “bootleg preacher,” Will Campbell got into lots of trouble as a minister and advocate for economic justice and racial equality in the South. The iconoclastic Baptist minister was director of religious life at the University of Mississippi in the late 1950s and was later a field officer for the National Council of Churches. He is also known for his books, including the celebrated memoir Brother to a Dragonfly. Campbell received the Presidential Humanities Medal in 2000.

In the 1880s Walter Rauschenbusch was a Baptist pastor in the Hell’s Kitchen district of New York City, where he served a poor, hurting, immigrant congregation and where he converted to the social gospel. His searing encounter with urban poverty, especially the funerals that he performed for children, drove him to political activism and a social-progressive understanding of Christianity.

Those who want to make lots of money and don’t care about breaking the law to do it have three main options: they can deal in drugs, deal in guns or deal in humans beings. Of these dubious but lucrative businesses, trafficking in humans is the fastest growing. Estimates put the number of slaves in the world at between 12 million (the United Nations figure) and 27 million (the figure offered by Kevin Bales, president of Free the Slaves, an organization committed to ending global slavery).

Though atmosphere-heavy and plot-light, and obviously pushing Brad Pitt for a “he’s doing serious art here” Academy Award, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford turns out to be a mesmerizing look at the final months of a gun-toting desperado. Pitt plays Jesse James, the former Confederate soldier who gained fame for his murders and bank robberies, most of them pulled off with cold-blooded panache with his older brother, Frank (Sam Shepard), and the Cole Younger clan.