Modern Reformation, March 2003]
FREE SPACE
An Interview with Frederica Mathews-Green: The Church-A View From the East
The author of numerous books, most recently, The Illumined Heart, Frederica Mathewes-Green is a commentator on NPR's Morning Edition, a book reviewer for the Los Angeles Times and a columnist for Beliefnet.com. Her book, Facing East, charts her movement from being an evangelical Episcopalian to her embrace of Eastern Orthodoxy. Among other things, we asked Frederica to help us understand why a number of evangelicals are attracted to Orthodoxy.
[Our Sunday Visitor, March 2, 2003]
What is it about the Civil War? We can’t quite get over it. It’s a story we tell ourselves over and over, never sure we’ve gotten it right.
There’s good reason for that. It’s a complex story, and the easy categories of South Bad, North Good don’t do it justice. Yet, just to demonstrate our ambivalence, it’s the South we pine for. More reenactors want to be Rebs than Yanks. No Northern gal holds the heart-place of Scarlett O’Hara. You can attribute this to romanticizing the losing side, but nobody romanticizes Hitler.
[Today's Christian, March-April 2003]
Is Suicide Unforgivable?
Q. We got into a discussion in my Bible class about whether Christians who commit suicide go to heaven. I always thought that God forgives everything, except the unforgivable sin of not accepting him. But others in my class hold different views. I have two questions: (1) Do Christians who commit suicide go to heaven? and (2) What is the “unforgivable sin”? --Carly M. Spokane, Washington
[Beliefnet, March 2003]
Since they debuted their after-the-Rapture thriller series a decade or so ago, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins have not aimed their “Left Behind” books at pleasing the sophisticated elite, the so-called “chattering classes.” It's not great lit, and doesn't pretend to be. (Personally, I gave up a few pages into the first volume, when a character was introduced this way: “His coworkers called him Buck, because he was always bucking the rules.”)
But the idea behind the series is nothing if not gripping.
[Dallas Morning News, February 1, 2003]
My husband came into my office one day to find me frowning at the computer screen. “I'm stuck,” I said. “I can't figure out how to make repentance sound appealing.”
In the ten years since I became a member of the Orthodox Church, that's been the biggest surprise to me: the unfolding joy of repentance. Every year about this time we get onto the long on-ramp to Lent, which will begin March 10 and last for seven long weeks till Easter (we call it Pascha). It's an intensely penitential time, marked by many extra church services and intensified fasting. I can't wait.
[National Review Online, January 22, 2003]
I was what the sociologists call an “early adopter” of feminism. Soon after arriving at college, in 1970, I knew that it was the religion for me. I had discarded the religion I grew up with, Christianity, as an insultingly simpleminded thing, but feminism filled the gap. Like a religion it offered a complete philosophical worldview, one that displayed me as victim in the center, a feature with immeasurable appeal to a female teenager. Feminism had its own gnostic analysis of reality, by which everything in existence was decoded to be about the oppression of women; it had sacred books, a secret vocabulary, and congregational gatherings for the purpose of consciousness-raising.
[NPR, “Morning Edition,” January 22, 2003]
Thirty years ago, when I was an idealistic college student, I volunteered at a feminist newspaper called “off our backs.” The Roe v Wade decision happened the first month I worked there. Our editorial said it didn't go far enough, because Roe requires a woman to have medical reason for abortion in the third trimester.
I thought abortion rights were going to liberate women.
[Our Sunday Visitor, January 26, 2003]
Pinocchio
I sat all alone in the theater to watch “Pinocchio”. Sometimes I didn't sit but got up and stretched and walked around, or leaned against a wall taking notes. And I wondered why I was alone. This is one of the few films I've seen that deserves the description “enchanting”: the sets, costumes, and cinematography are dazzling, the acting first-rate, the storyline exciting. Where were all the families--adults enjoying this as much as children?
Today's Christian, January-February 2003]
Q. I have a friend who believes that everything bad that happens to him is due to a demon. I worry about him both because he is not taking responsibility for some of the bad things that are happening to him, and because I believe that I do not really need to worry about demons when I am surrounded by the love and power of God. Am I right, or is he right, or are we both wrong? --Jodi J., Westville, IN
[Our Sunday Visitor, December 22, 2002]
“The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” is big. You knew that. And it’s noisy—hoo boy, with the surround-sound, it’s like being inside a washing machine. A Victorian poet hailed “ignorant armies [that] clash by night.” Now imagine that literalized, with the help of computer graphic software that creates gazillions of little critters, each programmed to pick a fight with the nearest other critter, and each given individual levels of weariness, impulsiveness, and intelligence.
