March 22, 2005

There is some uncertainty about what to do with the dead. Should we anoint them, embalm them, bury them, preserve them in vaults, or burn them up and keep their ashes on the shelf? Recently people have started doing some disturbing new things with dead bodies—turning ashes into jewelry, or freezing bodies for a day when they can be cloned.

Democratic Party leaders and progressive religious activists are persevering in their separate but complementary efforts to shape a connection between faith and politics. This is happening despite some embarrassing missteps last summer by party officials, and despite the November postelection letdown for those religious leaders who were denied access to the White House for another four years.

The literary phenomenon of “deconstruction” is regarded by many as an irresponsible fad that has now become passé. Fortunately, most of the wild, irresponsible readings of texts that went under the banner of “deconstruction” are passé. Yet in the same way that the historical performance movement has so deeply influenced classical music that it has become virtually the norm, the work of Jacques Derrida and Hans-Georg Gadamer has so affected our ways of reading texts that we are no longer aware of it.

A pair of British imports explores faith of different kinds. Millions, directed by Danny Boyle from a script by Frank Cottrell Boyce, is by far the slicker of the two. It is chock-full of glitzy visual effects, something to be expected from the man who directed the kinetic drug film Trainspotting.

Hell wants him, heaven won’t take him, earth needs him.” So proclaims the poster for Constantine. It sounds like an ad for a previous Keanu Reeves movie, the ridiculous Devil’s Advocate. Yet some of the same publicists who promoted Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ are promoting Constantine—and for similar reasons. Here, they say, is a film that takes the biblical worldview seriously. Constantine is about “spiritual warfare”: it shows that choices have eternal consequences, and it depicts hell as a place one should avoid.