When people unfamiliar with Sherwood Baptist’s line of movies such as “Facing the Giants” and “Fireproof” see their trailers, they can sometimes get the impression that these independent films are very emotional inspirational dramas. And while that’s true, the films also contain a good chunk of humor, some slice-of-life zaniness from the culture of Albany, Georgia, where the church is located and the films are produced.

Thus, it’s with pleasure that Big Hollywood presents this exclusive clip from “Courageous,” the latest film by director Alex Kendrick, available now on DVD and Blu-ray. Have a look at some of the bloopers, flubs, and just plain fun had on set during the film’s lighter moments:

The relentless way Bill Maher derides the intelligence of anyone who believes in God is proof positive that Mr. Bill is convinced he’s a genius. Although most liberals exhibit a similar “the dummies need us to think for them” propensity, when it comes to matters of religious faith, Maher elevates the affliction to a whole new level.

And while it’s pure speculation on my part, based on his juvenile behavior, it appears as if Maher is a disgruntled Catholic trying desperately to convince himself God doesn’t exist; so regardless of how bright he perceives himself to be, Maher lacks the insight to realize that he’s revealing something he’d probably prefer the rest of America not to notice.

For someone as mentally deficient as Maher believes I am, even as far back as the first grade I recognized that there was no direct correlation between parochial school and the personhood of God. Yet for all Maher’s clever innuendo and sarcastic banter, it must go deeper than that, because this man apparently isn’t astute enough to separate Catholicism from God.

Maher was raised by an Irish Catholic father and a mother (Julie, nee Berman) that he was unaware was Jewish until he was a teenager (which right there reeks of family dysfunction). Seems somewhere around the age of 13, when hormone-infused Bill, had he been raised a Jew, might have been practicing his Hebrew to prepare for an upcoming Bar Mitzvah, Maher’s Catholic dad realized birth control was a good idea after all.

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There’s a major split on the conservative scene that threatens to tear us apart, and we need to confront the issue head-on. No, it isn’t the Romney vs. a Conservative fight – let’s face it, we’re all going to vote for whoever wins the nomination. Hell, I’d vote for my terrier before I let this crew get another four years.  And my terrier is a terrier.

No, the great conflict I speak of is the schism between those of us who believe ‘The Walking Dead’ is great television and those of us who haven’t felt this level of disappointment in something they desperately wanted to support since John McCain got the nomination.

The premiere of the second season has scored boffo ratings, and Big Hollywood’s own Christian Toto has recently eloquently stated the pro-’Walking Dead’ case here. Many people love the show.  Can all these people be wrong?  Yes, and it gives me no pleasure to say so.

The fact is that ‘TWD’ is annoying, liberalish, and frustrating. It was last year as well, as I pointed out at length here at Big Hollywood (‘The Walking Dead: Populated With Racist Southerners, Dumb Characters‘). Testifying to the level of interest was the fact that it received over 400 comments, mostly questioning my taste, intellect and parental marital status.

People love zombie stories – I love zombie stories – and no one wants ‘TWD’ to fail. But the problem is that in the second season it seems to be going down the same dead end road as in the first season – except faster. (more…)

Vera Farmiga has lit up the screen in supporting roles for the past few years, first drawing viewers’ and critics’ attention by playing a police psychologist caught between Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio in 2006’s “The Departed” before landing an Oscar nomination as the mysterious flipside and lover of George Clooney’s commitment-phobic, constantly traveling businessman in 2009’s “Up in the Air.”

But her almost ethereal calm onscreen also hides a deep Christian faith, and that inspired her to go all the way as the director as well as star of the new film “Higher Ground.” While she’s following in the footsteps of icons like Clint Eastwood, Tom Hanks, and Robert DeNiro to make that creative leap, “Higher Ground” is a quietly personal film – a fictionalized take on the memoir “This Dark World” by Carolyn Bridges, about a woman’s struggle to balance her faith with her awareness of the nascent feminist movement of the early ‘70s – can she insist on having a voice in the small rural church she attends, or does she have to stay silent just because the men traditionally tell the women they need to be silent?

“Higher Ground” was a Sundance favorite in January, landing distribution with Sony Pictures Classics and started playing in New York and LA last week, with cities nationwide to come. Farmiga sat down recently with Big Hollywood to discuss the film and her profoundly personal reasons for directing it. (more…)

Why Christian symbols? We’re awfully easy pickings. If you’re a rich Hollywood star, offending us takes about as much courage as bringing a case of beer to a frat party.

Why not Islamic images? Where’s that comedic edge and ballsy envelope pushing we’re always being told about when it comes to our Artistic Class? Christians are tired of this self-important posing. Islamists will take your head off. I would think that Islamist intolerance (and racism and sexism and homophobia and fundamentalism) would be a bigger target than than Christian eye rolls.

Well, if nohing else, at least Gervais was good enough to bring the pretension:

 I thought the caption … could be “Stand up for what you believe”.

Doesn’t he mean for “what you don’t believe”?

Actually, he doesn’t. That’s why I call him Gervais an “evangelical atheist.” He’s one of those obnoxious non-believers always pushing his non-belief on you. He’s like a Mooonie without the charm, flowers or airport.

Back to the pretension:

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So, here it is. It’s no secret that Big Hollywood isn’t a fan of Lady Gaga; I’ve even made my own little snarky putdowns in the past. But when it comes to reviewing music, I have to do my best to remove personal prejudices– address the music itself and the ideas they communicate. On the first count, the album is a major mixed bag; a few enjoyable moments show up on a majority of the songs, and two or three are palatable all the way through. On the second, it’s a total mess–a self-important repackaging of “if it feels good, do it” that tells listeners no one has to validate them while Gaga repeatedly reveals her own insecurity over lacking validation.

MotorGaga

The Lady in question, known at birth as Stefani Germanotta, has progressed beyond wanting recognition or even fame; now she craves Importance, that vain pursuit which has derailed many a talented artist (and you can quibble about putting that label on her, I’m just being polite). And on Born This Way, this attitude goes beyond didactic lyrics; Gaga puts on the airs of a prophet/oracle/Messiah for the courageous, self-endangering causes of same-sex marriage and female empowerment, doing her best to conflate sexual identity with Christianity–not just any religion, but Christianity specifically.

The album has more references to Jesus than the latest Wovenhand record, the inevitable clash of her Catholic-school upbringing and her professed bisexuality. On the aggressive yet perversely endearing “Judas,” she sings, “I wanna love you, but something’s pulling me away from you / Jesus is my virtue, Judas is the demon I cling to.” Throughout the song, “Judas” has been the “Dear Abby” pseudonym for an abusive lover (perfectly appropriate to compare a bad relationship to the betrayal of the Christ), so first she’s Jesus (a “holy fool”) being betrayed by Judas, then Jesus is an external entity from which Judas is pulling her away… I’m instantly regretting the decision to analyze these lyrics. (more…)

There are apparently people out there who not only find Lady GaGa’s music appealing but, further, find her a powerful and insightful musical voice for a new generation.  These people are idiots, and the fact that most of these morons can vote goes a long way to explaining why so many Democrats keep getting reelected.

It’s not just that her music is bad – though it is, an intermittently catchy collection of overproduced beats laid over nonsense lyrics that would embarrass a slow-witted high school sophomore.  It’s not just that her singing is reminiscent of the hum of a dental drill, a monotonous, atonal mind-chisel that – when combined with her inane lyrics – reminds one of the chanting of some unholy love child of Rain Man and Tiny Tim.  

And it’s not just that she’s pretentious, presenting herself as the sorta-androgynous spoke-being for a coterie of alleged nonconformists whose nonconformity is expressed via rigid conformity to GaGa’s vision of pseudo-transgressive fashions and brain-dead self-affirming slogans.

No, the biggest problem with Lady GaGa isn’t that she’s another lame pop star.  It’s that she’s so damn boring.

As an act of personal sacrifice, I listened to the sneak release of her latest song, an atrocity called “Judas.”  If you want to share my pain, be my guest, but don’t say you weren’t warned.  The Huffington Post, your number one source for all things that suck, is right on top of the earthshaking cultural event that is “Judas”:

The song and video are told from Mary Magdelene’s perspective, with lyrics such as, “When he comes to me, I am ready/ I’ll wash his feet with my hair if he needs/ Forgive him when his tongue lies through his brain/ Even after three times, he betrays me/ I’ll bring him down, a king with no crown…”

Wow.  Heavy.  I guess I’m supposed to be one of those bourgeois squares whose mind is going to be blown by GagGa’s willingness to take on those terrifying Christians.  I’m here to report, however, that the only thing that blows is the song.

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Read part one of the interview here.

Here we continue our conversation with Daniel Smith, also known as Danielson, an independent musician and businessman based in rural New Jersey who’s done much to foster creativity and community for Christian performers through his record label, Sounds Familyre.  Smith has just released his first album in five years, Best of Gloucester County, which you can order here or from your favorite online retailer.

vimeo Danielson performing live for La Blogotheque

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Before we get back into the interview, I’ve got some thoughts about the record itself, which I’ve listened to quite a few times before its release.  As noted in the last portion of our conversation, this has been a transitional record for Danielson in many ways.  In addition to reassembling a team of supporting players, the band is standing in the shadow of 2006’s imposing concept album Ships.  Rather than try to escalate the sound into more “epic” territory, which would quickly degenerate into self-parody, Danielson scales things back and gets about as back-to-basics as he can.  Since he’s working with a smaller sonic palette that doesn’t change much from song to song, the album has a jammier feel; it takes me back to the 2001 Danielson Famile masterwork Fetch the Compass Kids.

Though there’s still some of the heady, theological musing that made up the majority of Ships, Gloucester healthily revives the overt humor of past Danielson days.  “Lil Norge” is a bouncy ball of pure fun co-starring Swedish pop singer Jens Lekman, drawing good-hearted laughs out of culture clashes between Swedes, Norwegians, and Americans, and the aforementioned “People’s Partay” basks in its small-town idiosyncrasies with clever couplets and wordplay.  It’s a light-hearted song about learning that all you need for celebration is other people, God’s most precious creation, and discovering the joy of belonging to a loving community. (more…)

At heart, the works of J.R.R. Tolkien — The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and even the often bleak and sad Silmarillion — are kindly works, not bitter and cynical ones. He was not interested in leaving his readers holding onto the last page of his books feeling empty, hopeless, cheated, or confused. Nor did he leave vast parts of his plots deliberately obfuscated and unresolved in order to claim an unearned depth and complexity for his work and thoughts. Quite the contrary: Tolkien took immense pains to give his tales not only spiritual and literary but dramatic satisfaction. He attempted — at great expense of time and effort, over a period of many years — to fill his work not just with questions but with answers, right down to carefully detailing the fate of Sam’s horse Bill (although, alas!, not the Entwives or Radagast!).

By graciously satisfying his readers’ insatiable curiosity in as many ways as possible, Tolkien puts himself at odds with many of today’s authors who, in an attempt to be ostentatiously arty and edgy, delight in leaving their readers with a sense of dramatic emptiness and thematic pointlessness. Just like in the film world, stories that ultimately resolve nothing and leave important plot threads hanging are in increasing vogue. Providing a paying reader with such basic dramatic tenets as resolution and closure is so last century, dont’cha know? Many books are so egregious in this regard that they leave readers saying, “Forget about happy endings, I’d be willing to settle for an ending of any kind — just tell me what happens!”

In the fantasy arena, a reader can easily wade through the swampy sludge of three books, five books, ten books, and even more, all spaced out over a period of many, many years, without ever reaching that terminus. Many fans die every year waiting for our fallen fantasists to achieve some sort of climax in their work worthy of the name.

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In 1944, J.R.R. Tolkien was tickled to receive a charming letter from a twelve-year-old Yankee praising The Hobbit, released seven years prior. It was, said the lad, “the most wonderful book I have ever read. It is beyond description. Gee Whiz. . . . ”

“It’s nice to find that little American boys do really say ‘Gee Whiz’,” the author joked to his son Christopher when he mentioned receiving the note. But surprisingly, his prevailing mood was somber:

I find these letters which I still occasionally get. . . make me rather sad. What thousands of grains of good human corn must fall on barren stony ground, if such a very small drop of water should be so intoxicating! But I suppose one should be grateful for the grace and fortune that have allowed me to provide even the drop.

Those are words, humble and true, that evoke the New Testament, conjuring an image of lost souls looking to quench an almost spiritual thirst. At the very time he wrote them, Tolkien was already deep into the agony and the ecstasy of the creation of The Lord of the Rings, and the intersection of the literary and the spiritual was on his mind. “God bless you beloved,” he told his son by way of signing off, but then tagged on a final, lingering question, one weighing heavily on his work: “Do you think the ‘Ring’ will come off, and reach the thirsty?”

It should be clear now to even the dimmest of critical bulbs that Tolkien’s own craving for heroic romance was hardly unique. Millions of others, equally parched in the modern world, were in dire need of the potent drought he was brewing. After The Lord of the Rings finally appeared, it inspired fan letters from grown adults that matched the enthusiasm of the little boy writing from America decades earlier. In The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien we are mostly denied the original missives, but can frequently read Tolkien’s reactions to them.

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One of the best-kept secrets about the Church is that Christians have often been pioneers and giants in the arts.  You certainly wouldn’t know that from what’s peddled as “Christian” music, that incestuous sub-genre known as CCM (contemporary Christian music) that embodies all the excess of the Nashville-based music industry.  Vain, kitschy, sappy, vapid, and overproduced, it’s an insult for us to offer such tripe in our worship instead of impassioned, finely crafted art.

Over the next few months, Big Hollywood will be highlighting the work of Christian musicians who buck this trend, who don’t use their music’s subject matter as an excuse for sucking but push boundaries for themselves and their listeners.  I’m personally ecstatic that our first contact is Daniel Smith, the founder and leader of the New Jersey-based music project named “Danielson” which has gone through many variations over the years, the first and most search engine optimized being the Danielson Famile.

Starting as a senior project at Rutgers University, the Danielson Famile was an experimental folk-rock outfit that consisted of Daniel Smith and his four siblings, some of whom were still in their teens.  Focusing on the marvelous fact that God has adopted him as a son, Daniel communicated his childlike faith through yelping, falsetto vocals, instruments like xylophones that sound like they’re being played by an out-of-control nursery, and unpredictable song structures.  As a fan, the first album A Prayer for Every Hour, I’ll admit, is off-putting and hard to sit through, but it was miraculously picked up by Tooth and Nail Records, which was then primarily known for releasing Christian punk music, allowing the Famile to tour and build up buzz in the indie world.  The rest is history, well documented in a great film from a few years back.

Over the past decade-plus, Danielson has gained and lost members as siblings moved on to other endeavors, and Daniel himself has settled into a different mode of writing as he’s built up his own family, started a record label, and come to appreciate a more provincial place in this world.  He’s gone from freak-folk ringleader to the frontman of one of the most slyly subversive pop-rock groups around, weaving layered Biblical allusions into poetic lyrics that can take Rubik’s-level effort to unravel.  His voice has given up on its squeakier octaves, and his melodies, while still unpredictable, have grown more accessible.  It’s a perfect time for anyone who’s unfamiliar with Danielson to hop on board and work their way back through his catalog of work.

Daniel was gracious enough to answer some questions about his new album Best of Gloucester County, which is hitting shelves almost five years since his latest (much lauded) release, Ships– an eternity in music years, but as you’ll see below, for good reason.   You can order the album directly from his label, Sounds Familyre, and those who purchase the vinyl LP will receive a digital copy of the album.  Below is the first single for Gloucester, a song called “Grow Up,” followed by part 1 of our exclusive interview.

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“Oh f***, not another elf!”

Thus exclaimed English academic Hugo Dyson as his friend J.R.R. Tolkien prepared to read aloud the latest chapter in his then-unpublished “heroic romance” to a small audience of intimates in the pleasantly smoke-filled, gin-scented rooms of C. S. Lewis. Years earlier, during a fateful night of impassioned debate, it was Dyson and Tolkien who together convinced Lewis to forsake unbelief and embrace Christianity, doing such a good job of it that the future author of The Chronicles of Narnia would become the most influential Christian vindicator (I despise the word apologist) of the twentieth century.

Now Dyson was mocking the work of the man who would become the most influential purveyor of Christianized fiction of that same century, and many of Tolkien’s fellow Inklings were of the same mind. It was thus left to Lewis to spur the author of The Hobbit on to greater heights of imagination. “If they won’t write the kind of books we want to read, we shall have to write them ourselves,” he once told Tolkien, and that’s just what they did. Each used the medium known (fondly to some, pejoratively to most) as “fairy stories” to achieve the tang and ring and chime — and through them the thoughts and feelings and beliefs — that they were seeking in literature.

In between his increasingly unpopular Inkling readings, Tolkien wrote during snatches of time carved out of days filled with exhausting academic duties, and frequently only after penning worried, often melancholy letters to his sons off to war. “I sometimes feel appalled,” he admitted in one 1944 missive, “at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment. . . If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapour, shrouded from the amazed visions of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil….” In another he lamented that, “A small knowledge of history depresses one with the sense of the everlasting mass and weight of human iniquity: old, old, dreary, endless repetitive unchanging incurable wickedness. All towns, all villages, all habitations of men — sinks! . . . We do so little that is positive good, even if we negatively avoid what is actively evil. It must be terrible to be a priest!”

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[Editor's Note: This list is arranged in no particular order. Read Part I here.]

6.  “Nuclear weapons are awful.” – Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

There are probably a few inventions that have saved more human lives and prevented more suffering than nuclear weapons.  The wars since World War II, when we quite properly dropped two A-Bombs on Japan and ended the slaughter, have been a mere shadow of what they would have been without our thermonuclear arsenal.  That’s just a fact, and all the posturing about the “insanity” of deterrence in this inexplicably beloved movie can’t change that.  You should love The Bomb.

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Of course, Dr. Strangelove provides a better idea than nuclear deterrence by wholeheartedly embracing anti-missile defense.  Nah, just kidding.  The film advocates nothing except ironic detachment, essentially abdicating any responsibility and simply complaining about a strategy that, well, worked.  And let me be blunt – it just doesn’t hold up after all these years.  There, I said it.  Except Slim Pickens – Slim will always rock. (more…)

Selecting the stupidest liberal messages in movie history is sort of like trying to pick the world’s most annoying rapper – the competition is intense.  There are just so many candidates, and they each suck so badly in their own unique way.

Any attempt to pick the worst of the worst is bound to disappoint someone.  This list by no means contains all of the hackneyed, parochial, and just plain obnoxious bits of liberal received wisdom that the Hollywood brain trust has spewed forth over the years.  For every nitwit insight on the list, there are dozens more floating around the nether reaches of Netflix, waiting to annoy the unwary.  No doubt the commenters will find many more.

So, here my top ten in no particular order:

1. “All American Soldiers are psychos.” – Platoon (1986)

It’s pretty obvious that the American soldier is the greatest force for evil in all of human history – or it would be, if all you watched were post-Vietnam War Hollywood movies.  It seems that to most of the hacks in Hollywood, the mere act of donning an Army uniform turns you into a bloodthirsty killing machine with an appetite for murder.  And that’s not just on the battlefield.  In American Beauty (1999), the conservative Marine neighbor not only abuses his wife and son but murders people because he’s secretly gay!  That’s a liberal stereotype trifecta – they probably think it makes him a prime candidate for King of the Tea Party. (more…)

When the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, announced that they were going to remake True Grit, it sparked all of the usual arguments about the merits and demerits of such undertakings.

The first film, released in 1969, sits in the mid-upper tier of movies made by its star, John Wayne (as well as winning him his only Oscar), and as such has achieved a kind of classic status among both Wayne fans and lovers of good westerns. There is a brand of theatergoer who maintains that there is no need to craft fresh takes on successful pictures, any more than we need new painters to dutifully re-imagine a masterwork like Da Vinci’s Last Supper.

On the other side of the debate are those who see good reasons for taking another swing at this piñata. Ever since the appearance of Wayne’s Grit, many fans of the novel — which first appeared forty-two years ago as a Saturday Evening Post serial written by Charles Portis (1933–) — have been keen to see a cinematic version that hews far closer to the plot of the book. Others see remakes as akin to a contemporary orchestra re-recording — and in the process re-interpreting — a famous piece of classical music, imbuing it with their own particular sonic signature. Seen in this light, the announcement of a new True Grit was a welcome one.

So now that the movie is out, who is right? Is the remake ill-advised, or a welcome addition to the western canon? Does the 2010 version have what it takes to make it a classic in its own right, or is it destined to be forever overshadowed by the 1969 original? (more…)

I’ve always been a little wary about indie superstar Sufjan Stevens. I first heard his music at an informational meeting for the philosophy club at my Baptist school (turns out it was a hangout for all the self-superior leftists with beards on campus). His albums-about-the-states projects have seemed too calculated, inorganic, self-congratulating-ly clever. In his “The Great Sufjan Song Xmas Xchange!” contest, he picked the lamest possible song as the winner (full disclosure:  I entered and am a bad loser). Recently, in a notorious interview (where he was the interviewer), Stevens delivered a bizarre, “poor-me” monologue hinting towards retiring from music because albums—nay, the very concept of songs!—were dying, if not already dead.

Cover art by Royal Roberts

Yet at the end of the day, Stevens always redeems himself.  The holier-than-thou social gospel-ers at my school were right to put him on because he’s one of the only Christians in the music world who isn’t a total embarrassment. His work, however immense and lofty it gets, sounds so meticulous because he’s agonized over and found the best possible way to arrange and express his ideas. Regardless of his inexplicably lame choice, his “Song Xchange” contest was an unprecedented event, connecting artist and fans in a way that never would have been possible before the Internet.  And, most importantly, he hasn’t retired from music or tried to redefine albums or whatever he was getting at.

After numerous side projects, he’s following up the universally-acclaimed Illinois with his first proper album since 2005– The Age of Adz– and he’s surpassed his previous work by light years. I came into Adz fully expecting to be the cynical contrarian I was to The Suburbs, but within one playthrough I knew I was listening to an inspired masterwork by a supremely gifted artist. (more…)

The first thing the viewer will notice about the new CBS series Blue Bloods (Fridays, 10 EDT) is its impressive cast: Tom Selleck, Donnie Wahlberg, Bridget Moynahan, and Len Cariou lead a very talented group of performers. But what makes the show really worth watching is its sophisticated attitude toward the police: in theory they are admirable, and to a great degree in practice as well, but the exceptions are often disastrous.

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The opening scenes of the pilot episode establish a strongly positive view of the police, conveying a sense that the great majority go into the job with some amount of idealism, even if the system is prone to corruption. We meet the Reagan family, a multigenerational clan of New York City police officers, currently led by Police Chief Frank Reagan (Selleck). His son, Detective Danny Reagan (Wahlberg), is called away from a graduation ceremony for new police officers, where his Harvard-educated brother is one of the new-minted coppers.

All of this sets up the ideal against which the show then compares the reality of policing a major American city. The case to which Danny Reagan is called concerns a daylight kidnapping of a young girl off a New York City street. Reagan and partner Demarcus King (Flex Alexander) follow up on a meager allotment of clues, pressed hard by a pair of urgent deadlines: the awareness that the odds of recovering a kidnap victim unharmed raise exponentially with each passing hour, and, perhaps equally important in their minds, pressure from the mayor and other political figures to avert the inevitable public relations nightmare a killing would create. (more…)

So AP writer Allen Breed begins his recent mosque piece by defining the word, “tolerance.” It’s a traditional rhetorical device, one learned back in sixth grade while plagiarizing the Encyclopedia Britannica.

His piece focuses on religion, of course, – but not Islam, Christianity or even my favorite, “the universal life force of the Grand Unicorn.”

His all powerful religion? Tolerance.

Of course, for him, tolerance can only play one way. As Yanks we must kneel before the alter of acceptance, while everyone else uses us as a footrest.

I mean, I doubt Breed would MENTION tolerance to the mosque developers. Instead, true to the predictable mind grazing on hysterical cliches, he hearkens back to the witch trials – the most overused example of intolerance ever – and one that probably deserved it. I mean, witches suck.

Breed then quotes a reverend who says this is all due to a “dominant religious lens factor” – meaning, i guess, when one group thinks their religion is better than others.

He knows this, since he’s a wiccan minister, a practitioner of a cult populated by veiny spinsters with cats. I guess the writer wouldn’t find an imam tolerant enough to grant him an interview.

Or maybe he didn’t look. (more…)

Anne Rice has left Christianity.

“In the name of Christ,” says Rice, she can no longer, “belong to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group.”

Rice went on to say, “I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life.”

That her very statement itself is quarrelsome and hostile, that her list of refusals is patently disputatious, and that she herself is infamous for promoting a dark and cynical view of humanity in her early vampire novels, places these remarks so far past irony that they border wanton hypocrisy.

They bring to mind a parable about logs and eyes that one assumes Ms. Rice, “in the name of Christ,” has likely heard.

Of course, Progressive Christians like Kirsten Powers, and Christianity-haters like Perez Hilton – two groups almost universally aligned on every issue – were quick to defend and praise Ms. Rice.  According to Jonathan Merritt, author of Green Like God – Unlocking the Divine Plan for our Planet, Anne Rice feels that “Christianity has been hijacked.” (more…)

Not quite sure how you can be a follower of Christ and not be a Christian, but novelist Anne Rice is giving it a shot. Wednesday, the “Interview With a Vampire” author posted this on her Facebook account:

I quit being a Christian. I’m out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.

Hours later she posted this:

My faith in Christ is central to my life. My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn’t understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me. But following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been, or might become.

Obviously, she’s trying make a point and get a little attention for doing so. Here are some snips from an interview she did yesterday: (more…)