December 12, 2006

The Lebanese Presbyterian community is faithfully lighting candles on an Advent wreath this Sunday—and waiting. Disillusionment and desperation are growing all around them in Beirut, but, as Pastor Joseph Kassab says, “We have no choice here but to hope in a better future.” Then he adds: “Unfortunately, we don’t control it.”

As the Democrats wrested control of Congress from the Republicans for the first time since 1994, exit polls revealed some changes in the pattern of faith-based politics, but also much continuity. Democrats won 53 percent of the two-party vote for the House of Representatives, a five percentage-point gain over 2004 (a presidential year) and a six point increase from 2002 (the previous midterm election).

Like many Americans, I decided in early 2003 that a war with Iraq was increasingly necessary. War seemed justifiable because of the intelligence reports concerning Iraq’s weapons programs and because Saddam Hussein, who had committed atrocities in the past, was likely to be highly dangerous if he acquired weapons of mass destruction. The arguments for war could be supported by reference to the well-known just war theory.

A few days after Christian de Chergé’s death on May 21, 1996, his mother opened a sealed letter and read what he had written three years earlier. Islamic terrorist groups had begun killing foreigners in Algeria, where De Chergé, a Frenchman, was prior of a Trappist monastery. Anticipating his own death, he wrote down his last testament. In our current global climate, his words provide a startling contrast to language that tends to pit the Western world against the Middle East and to equate Muslims with terrorists.

Holiday

In George Cukor’s 1938 adaptation of a Philip Barry comedy of manners, Cary Grant plays a young man who vaults over his working-class background to strike it rich and win the hand of an aristocrat (Doris Nolan). But he doesn’t want the future her wealth-loving father has mapped out for him; he dreams of a life of adventure. Katharine Hepburn plays his fiancée’s sister, who is fighting her own quiet rebellion against her family’s values and sees a kindred spirit in him. Grant and Hepburn give peerless performances.

The Fallen Idol

Choral and vocal

This CD has almost all the unaccompanied sacred mixed-choir music Brahms wrote after his mid-20s, plus the earlier fragments of a canonic mass. The 37-member choir performs with excellent dynamics and diction in a resonant space.

The acclaimed Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González I&ntildeárritu strings together four stories from around the globe in Babel. It’s an effort to show an interconnected world marked by divisions, alienation and suspicion—the curse of Babel. In the Moroccan countryside, two brothers entrusted with their father’s sheep on a hillside are given a rifle to shoot jackals; fascinated by the trajectory of the bullets, they try out the rifle on a passing bus on the road below and unintentionally hit an American tourist (Cate Blanchett), who is traveling with her husband (Brad Pitt).