January 2, 2002

It is not easy to be a moderate in the United Methodist Church today. On the right are the conservatives, exemplified by Good News magazine, who want Methodists to conform to their pinched vision of orthodoxy. On the left are the liberals, exemplified by the church bureaucracy and the Council of Bishops, whose concept of leadership seems to be limited to condescending sloganeering. Harsh words perhaps; but sometimes there is no way to take the sting out of the truth. We have seen this unhappy dichotomy on the issue of homosexuality for a couple of decades.

For many years, Suzanne Hiatt taught a course on “Death and Dying” to seminarians. When she got sick last year, she got to see how the actual experience compared to her class notes. “What I never thought of was how clergy behaved on a hospital visit. What I learned when I was in the hospital allegedly dying is: they’re terrible at it. They don’t want to talk about the illness. They say, ‘How are you? Isn’t the weather lovely?’”

There are many Jesuses, despite the fact that there was only one. Permutations began appearing as early as the first century and have not abated, making efforts to uncover the historical Jesus, the real man from Nazareth, notoriously fraught and conflicting endeavors—as Christians who have tried can attest. The written record is incomplete and contradictory; archaeology can only assist and often merely confounds; scholars must detect and filter the “errors” of early accounts while keeping their own biases at bay.

The first of three annual film installments of J. R. R. Tolkien's 1,500-page epic The Lord of the Rings, directed by New Zealander Peter Jackson, has many fine qualities. The New Zealand scenery evokes the fantastically real world of Tolkien's Middle-earth, and the tunnelly hobbit-homes are finely rendered. The special effects--whether in the brilliance of Gandalf's magical fireworks or the hideousness of the fiend called the Balrog--are also well done. Jackson gives riveting attention to the actors' faces, especially the discerning eyes of the wizard Gandalf.