Features
Oberammergau 2000: The passion revised
The Passion Play at Oberammergau is a vast spectacle that can be viewed at many levels. As a dramatic and musical performance, its quality is astonishingly high, considering that everyone connected with the production—from actors, musicians, director and set designer down to the smallest child who cries out “Hosanna,” some 2,200 persons in all—is from this one small German town (population 5,350). The pacing is rapid, the characters are sharply drawn, the dramatic tension remains high throughout, and the 48-voice choir and 75-member orchestra provide a stirring musical accompaniment.
Eruption of truth: An interview with Raimon Panikkar: On inter- and intrareligious dialogue
I was brought up in the Catholic religion by my Spanish mother, but I never stopped trying to be united with the tolerant and generous religion of my father and of my Hindu ancestors. This does not make me a cultural or religious “half-caste,” however. Christ was not half man and half God, but fully man and fully God. In the same way, I consider myself 100 percent Hindu and Indian, and 100 percent Catholic and Spanish. How is that possible? By living religion as an experience rather than as an ideology.
Books
From reformer to revolutionary
I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King Jr., by Michael Eric Dyson...
Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee
In this novel, perhaps his masterpiece, J. M. Coetzee emerges as the most old-fashioned kind of literary genius: a person whose strong imagination is guided by firm and deeply held beliefs....
The Oxford History of Islam, edited by John L. Esposito
If you're looking for a scholarly one-volume history of Islam that is comprehensive, richly illustrated and designed to be readable, this is one of the best....
Departments
Authority figures: Resolving ecclesial issues
There’s an old bumper sticker with the words “Question authority.” To which the proper response, of course, is: “Says who?” As that reply suggests, suspicion of authority, however well advised, does not solve or clarify the problem of authority....
Political maneuvers
Media, religion and politics have a way of smashing into one another in rich and sometimes perverse ways....
Diminished
Our hopes are a measure of our greatness. When they shrink, we ourselves are diminished. The story of American hope over the past two centuries is one of increasing narrowing—or so argues Andrew Delbanco in The Real American Dream....
A cereal offense
General Mills recently tucked a CD-ROM containing the Bible into 12 million cereal boxes and then had to issue profuse apologies for having done so as it withdrew the offensive inclusions....
Lectionary
When the gospel goes to the dogs (Mark 7:24-30)
If we are to get past our discomfort with the name-calling, we will have to look more closely and note what Jesus does with the word dog.