“Do you believe that Jesus died in the sense that if you had been there that day, you could have rubbed your finger on the cross and got a splinter in it?”

–Francis Schaeffer, The God Who Is There

I read that simple, elegant question as a senior in high school, and it’s stuck with me for almost seven years now. How profoundly that illustrates the unique historical revelation of the Gospels; instead of revealing himself through a lengthy vision or message that could only be seen/translated by one lucky individual, God showed up on earth to be seen, heard, even touched by anyone who was able. The disciples’ letters in the New Testament often reaffirm this sensory proof; 1 John refers to “[t]hat which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched.”

They saw a man walking over the deep sea; they saw the blind and lame healed; but most importantly, they saw a dead man–dead from an extremely thorough, conclusive form of murder–alive, still sporting his wounds but eating and drinking, walking and talking. Their insistence upon claiming they sensed these things led virtually all of them to a life of constant persecution and eventually execution.

It’s with that in mind that I present the end result of my obsession with Schaeffer’s question, “I Could Get a Splinter,” a song that’s far too serious for me, given all the anti-hipster hipster cred I’ve built up with constant sarcasm and above-it-all potshots. I hope that this song, as well as its B-side, “Who Could Have Known,” help you feel a little bit of wonder at the Incarnation and how God became a man so that we could be forgiven for constantly choosing our self-destructive autonomy over his perfection. (more…)

If comic book artists were rock stars, Billy Tucci would be more of a Yo-Yo Ma – a man whose talents would be recognized immediately by those fortunate enough to discover him.

I first met Tucci, an award-winning illustrator and graphic novel writer, at San Diego’s massive Comic-Con International in 2010. Tucci was intently drawing away in his display booth seated next to an aged but unbowed veteran of WWII’s famous 442nd Regimental Combat Team.

On closer inspection, I saw that that Billy was personalizing a panel connected with his then-current offering, “Sgt. Rock – The Lost Battalion.” This illustrated novel was a beautifully rendered fusion of the fictional Sgt. Rock combat hero with a historically accurate account of the 141st Regiment’s rapid advance into German lines only to be cut off in the rugged Vosges Mountains region.

Running low on food and ammunition and with casualties running high, the divisional commander made the decision to break the German siege of the 141st by sending in the 442nd. The 14,000 men who would serve in the 442nd, a regiment of Japanese-Americans recruited out of internment camps, earned 21 Medals of Honor, more than 9,000 Purple Hearts, and more than 18,000 medals overall – the greatest number of decorations for any unit of its size and duration of combat service.

Tucci has an eye for detail and, in the case of his military-themed work, this detail is fortified by personal service in the Special Forces as an enlisted man in the 1990s.

I saw Tucci again last weekend at the Austin Comic-Con, where his latest work caught my eye because it was so decidedly out of his usual superhero, military, beautiful fantasy samurai/geisha woman pinup genre: a graphic novel about, as Tucci said, “The greatest superhero of all time.”   (more…)

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…)

Anyone familiar with the “Acts of the Apostles” will understand that using the word “sequel” in reference to Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ” is a perfectly appropriate description. Picking up right where the “Passion” left off would be absurdly easy. ANY money-hungry producer or director eager to recreate the cinematic phenom of the double aughts, not to mention one of the most profitable films in history, need only bring ”Acts”  to life on the silver screen. Then why don’t they?  Well, that’s the $60,000 question.  There’s so much money being left on the table, it’s very much the elephant in Hollywood’s gilded room.  

Sure, we’re getting films like the “Blind Side,” “Narnia,” and “Fireproof” — all of which are appreciated, but nothing like the visceral emotional experience of a “Passion” that hits the faithful in their very soul and translates into a real religious experience. For all the obvious reasons, Hollywood seems unwilling to do what they do with every other hit film: recreate it over and over and over until it drops dead of fatigue.

But why would any sane filmmaker take the risk? We all saw what the Hollywood establishment and the MSM did to Gibson long before he said those terrible things during his DWI arrest a year or so later. We all watched as they set out to destroy an Academy-Award-winning director in every way possible, to toxify him. But that was the idea. The MSM and Hollywood were so threatened by the very idea of the ”Passion” (no one had seen it when the attacks began) — especially should it be a hit –  that their only recourse was to launch into the ugliest and most personal campaign of destruction launched against a filmmaker since the 1950s. And the message to the rest of Hollywood was clear….

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Ed. Note: In addition to Dana’s lovely message, let me also recommend Marcia Morrissey’s “The Easter Sunrise of My New Life” and The Anchoress. Perfect, poignant, insightful Easter reading. – JN

In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground but the men said to them, “Why do you look for living among the dead? He is not here, he has risen!”
Luke 24: 5

“Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.”
Luke 24:39

He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation.”
Mark 16:15

2 Peter 3:18

“This is a loving, caring Jesus,” is how the director of a play involving abortion described a leading man to the New York Times.

The play, written by a Notre Dame grad, recently took to stage at the University of Delaware. The dialogue includes a gal asking Christ: “Did you ever say, ‘I’m Jesus, and I say that stupid girls who let guys talk them into going to the back seat of their cars have to have babies?’ Did you say that ever?”

“No,” Jesus replies.

“All you talk about is, be nice to each other!” the teenager continues. “You never said nobody’s allowed to have an abortion.”

The fictional Jesus confirms her assertion.

“So can I? Can I? Can I?” she asks.

“Honestly, I — I don’t really have an issue with it,” Jesus tells her.

Honestly?

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It’s impossible for me to hate these people more than I already do, so let me just say that I would sure like to be there when Jesus throws Fred Phelps and his followers out of his office and into the pit of Hell.

The Wrap:

The fiercely anti-gay [Westboro Baptist Church] — which has generated controversy by protesting at funerals of service members — announced its intentions to picket Taylor’s memorial service on Wednesday.

While the group didn’t say exactly why they planned to disrupt the funeral of the actress, who passed away at 79 on Wednesday, it’s a safe bet that Taylor’s activism for AIDS patients has something to do with it. Margie Phelps, daughter of WBC leader Fred Phelps, tweeted about the planned picket on Wednesday, referring to Taylor as a “serial-adulterous f– hag.”

From what I’ve read, the very reason Liz Taylor married so often was due to her desire not to cheat. So they might not even be hating her for the right reasons. Regardless, by all accounts Taylor was one of the most beloved and universally adored stars in the history of Hollywood. She also took up the righteous cause to fight AIDS long before red ribbons became Hollywood chic — which is probably the real motive behind this protest. Like the rest of us, Taylor undoubtedly had her moments of moral weakness, but there’s never been a moment in her life where she purposefully committed an act of outright evil like, say, picketing a funeral.

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If there is a line to get into hell the man standing at the front is author and habitual literary-prevaricator James Frey. Frey, one of those writers who in their misguided youth got hooked on drugs, stole things, got in fights, went to jail and then wrote an autobiography about it.  His was titled, “A Million Little Pieces.” Problem is, most of his story was made up and Oprah’s book club busted him for it.

Meet James Frey

What’s a shameless author to do to get back into the good graces of the New York literary world while hoping to conjure up a Hollywood movie deal? Offer a sacrifice to their godless imagination in the form of a new novel entitled, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, staring Jesus, an alcoholic bachelor who sleeps with prostitutes and marries gay couples. The other gimmick placed atop Mr. Frey’s inane offering is a limited U.S. print run of 10,000 slip-cased leatherette copies, as well as 1,000 collector’s editions signed and numbered by the author.

Mr. Frey said in a 2008 interview the book is his “idea of what the Messiah would be like if he were walking the streets of New York today.” His Jesus — or Ben Jones – is apparently a drunk who impregnates a prostitute, smokes pot and fools around with men. “It doesn’t matter how or who you love. I don’t believe the messiah would condemn gay men and women,” Frey said. Judas, meanwhile, would be the “same as he was two thousand years ago”, a “selfish man who thinks of himself before the good of humanity, who values money more than love.”

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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…)

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HBO has just announced they’re producing a big screen biopic of the The Mighty Sam Kinison, which is interesting when you consider the state of things today. Below are five of my favorite Kinison routines, let’s see if you can guess which is the only one the great man would not have been roundly condemned as a hater for in this the year 2010.

It was actually shocking to go back and listen to these bits after so many years, shocking to hear left-wing sacred cows take a scathing beating at the hands of a comedic genius who, among other things, wielded personal responsibility like a weapon. Today, of course, we know personal responsibility by its Orwellian term: blaming the victim. Can you imagine today’s so called “edgy” comedians going after starving Africans? Unless those starving Africans love NASCAR or are named Sarah Palin, no. Would Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, David Letterman, or Jim Carrey even agree to share the same stage with a 2010 Sam Kinison? Would he be allowed on “The View?”

And what if God’s timing were different? What if instead of being a young comic on the rise in the early 1980s, Kinison was a young comic on the rise in 2010? Same man. Same genius. Same sensibility. Same drive. Would he have a chance? Could he do the Rock Hudson or the homeless bit (below) and survive today’s Brave New World where the left calls for the head of Juan Williams over expressing a fear of seeing Muslims on the same airplane, Comedy Central censors “South Park,” and we’re being told if a joke about electric cars being gay isn’t deep-sixed children will die.

That’s a rhetorical question best answered by recalling how the world awkwardly came to a halt when Bill Maher stuck up for Western civilization, watching “comedians” Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg storm off “The View” because Bill O’Reilly said something provocative, or the near annihilation of Don Imus’ career.

Consider today’s so-called King of Satire. This skit personifies what Jon Stewart is about, nothing more than a PC-enforcing prig attempting to shame people like Juan Williams and Bill O’Reilly for daring to speak their minds. There was a time when the job of a satirist was to provoke thought. Consider Stewart’s “Restore Sanity” rally — a national event entirely devoted to scolding two television networks for not telling what Stewart believes to be the truth and in the method, manner and tone in which he approves.  

Things sure have changed around here. (more…)

Law and Order: Criminal Intent, the long-running spinoff of the recently canceled TV crime drama mainstay Law and Order, has on fairly regular occasions manifested the overt progressivist and anti-Christian bias of its forebear This week’s episode is one of the most blatant instances yet.

It’s a pity because the show, now broadcast on the USA Network, has interesting story lines and the central characters, NYC police detectives played by Jeff Goldblum and Saffron Burrows, are intelligent and fairly likable.

Unfortunately, this week’s story line is neither. In “Palimpsest,” detectives Nichols and Stevens investigate a case involving two wealthy Manhattan antiquarians who apparently killed each other in a sword-fighting duel. (That kind of insanely bizarre situation is common for the show.) Also involved in the story is the schizophrenic adult daughter of one of the dead men, whom Nichols used to date before her illness became manifest. (more…)

Andrew Breitbart appeared at an awards ceremony in Chicago on Friday the 16th and one of his remarks was that Hollywood is “40 years into the left injecting bad into America.” To counter the bad, Breitbart urged us all to remind each other what is good in our great nation. As an illustration of Breitbart’s warning, I give you Paul Verhoeven, the director of the 1987 film Robocop.

Verhoeven recently spoke to MTVs Josh Horowitz about the underlying symbolism of Robocop and his main conception was that the Robocop character was an “American Jesus” because his method of righting wrongs was to shoot and kill all evil doers. Robocop was judge, jury, and executioner all in one and that apparently makes him an “American Jesus.”

It was Verhoeven’s contention that America is little else but a violent nation that has no interest in peace, law, order, or diplomacy, but is the quintessentially violent cowboy, self-interested, and mostly a lawless place. (more…)

Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.  Fool me three times, and I’m probably in on the scam with you – or I am a fool.

James Cameron’s next project may well be a film about Hiroshima.  Sure, after the powerful show of solidarity he gave to our troops in the largely Oscar-free Avatar, you are probably thinking, “Hey, this will be a fair-minded project that shows that dropping the A-Bomb on Japan was a tough but necessary decision which ended up saving hundreds of thousands of American lives – and probably millions of Japanese.”

Pellegrino and Cameron

Surprise!  Instead, it promises to not only be another round of America-bashing but, moreover, one based on the work of a gentleman with a demonstrated track record of fraud and distortion.  Cameron’s long-time pal, Dr. Charles Pellegrino, wrote The Last Train from Hiroshima, the book that Cameron wants to turn into a movie.  It’s a shattering tale of horror told in part from the point of view of an American flyer who deeply regrets his participation.  There’s just one little problem with this important new addition to the historical canon – it seems to have been largely made up by the good doctor.  But, of course, Cameron would not be the King of the World if he let a little thing like rampant fraud get in the way of some gratuitous America-bashing.

So who is Charles Pellegrino - and I use the title “Doctor” here loosely, since this clown’s academic credentials are on par with Dr. Dre’s?   Well, for one thing he does not appear to be a PhD holder from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, as he has claimed.  At least, that was the finding of a reporter from The Telegraph.  Those wacky Brit newspapers and their reporters – going out and actually investigating and reporting instead of acting as unofficial stenographers for their favorite leftist subjects can turn up the darndest things!   (more…)

Double Dosage!!! Sorry, I got a bit behind on Shhhtuff, so I hope I can do a lil’ catch up with ya! Here’s me lookin’ out for my womens like Sarah Palin, and a vid lookin’ at naughty Nidal after the jump.

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What in the world is wrong with people in the entertainment industry who come from humble beginnings, have a few years of real struggle and then with their uniqueness and by the grace of God (which you could interpret as luck), they make it big, as in rich and famous big. The chances of becoming as famous as Lindsay Lohan are 1 in 1,574,638 as tracked by E-Poll Market Research, but really, wouldn’t you rather be you?

Mr. David has been blessed beyond any struggling writer, producer, actor or stand-up comedian’s wildest dreams. His total cash receipts have still not been tallied since the funds continue to pour in from “Seinfeld,” but it’s accurate to say that with what he has earned to date, he could have paid for a lot of Nancy Pelosi’s botox.

Years after helping make television history, David jumped back into the small screen with the blessing of HBO and created “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” which — in line with him marching to the beat of his own drum — is done unscripted. The show has a very solid following as it is in its seventh season, which is three television lifetimes these days. Great Larry, Mazal Tov. Isn’t America grand? Bet you would only have had the career of Heidi from the Hills if you lived in Cuba.  (more…)

“Larry David would never do this to Muslims. He doesn’t have the guts.”

That’s missing the point.

Hypocrisy or a fear of how some wacko extremist might react has nothing to do with this. Hollywood constantly singles out Christians for cruel ridicule and the worst kind of stereotyping for one simple reason…

They hate us.

They hate our guts.

There’s nothing more complicated to this question than that.

I promise you that if every Muslim on the planet was as gentle as a kitten, it would still be Christians singled out by the entertainment industry at every opportunity. (more…)

WASHINGTON, Oct. 29 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — A prominent national Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization today called on HBO to apologize for an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” in which the main character splattered urine on a painting of Jesus.

SEE: Larry David Blasted for ‘Curb’ Episode Where He Urinates on Jesus Painting http://tinyurl.com/hboepisode

In a letter to HBO Chairman and CEO Bill Nelson, Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) wrote:

“It is beyond tasteless to insult the religious sensibilities of billions of people in America and around the world with such a cheap and vulgar publicity stunt. Jesus, peace be upon him, is loved and revered by both Christians and Muslims. Muslims view him as one of God’s greatest messengers to mankind. (more…)