There will be a screening of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew) this Saturday 13 August 2005 at 2:00 pm as part of the Italian Film Festival. The Screening will take place in the Zeidler Hall – main floor of the Citadel Theatre Complex (9828-101A Avenue). Tickets for adults are $8 and are available half an hour before the show.

Many consider this film to be one of the best Jesus films produced. I have previously blogged on it here. I highly recommend Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew. If you live in the Edmonton area, you should take advantage of this showing and see it on the big screen!

The film is available in both DVD (Buy from Amazon.ca | Buy from Amazon.com) and VHS format (Buy from Amazon.ca | Buy from Amazon.com).

It started with an innocent blog entry on my messy desk. That spawned a series of bloggers showing their messy desks (except Jim West — his desk is very, very, clean). Then Michael Bird brought it all to a head with a picture of his interim office (or should I say, “brought it all to the head”). Now Edmund Fearon has connected all of the dots with his post on whether or not it is appropriate to read in the bathroom (“where books should not go…”). He thinks not: “taking a book into the bathroom to read as you do your business is simply wrong!”

I must beg to differ. I confess. I read in the bathroom. It’s not as if I take a volume of Barth’s Church Dogmatics in there to peruse. But I do take books that I am skimming for various reasons. I refer to these books affectionately as my “bathroom books.” Currently, in the upstairs ensuite I am looking at Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture by Vincent J. Miller, while on the main floor I have a collection of English essays and various journals and newspapers.

I don’t know why I do it… well, actually I do know why. I hate to waste time. The same thing that motivates me to do some light reading in the potty also compels me to read while walking home from work (so far I have not walked into any posts!).

So there you have it. Does anyone want to borrow a book?

I was at the local 7/11 (thank heaven) earlier today refilling one of those DoubleGulp cups that litter my office and was amazed to find out from the cover of this week’s World Weekly News that the Garden of Eden has been Found! They claim that the garden is at the bottom of the Persian Gulf, which is ridiculous since we know from reading the Bible that Eden would be a mountaintop garden since four rivers found their source within it! Duh!

What I find really confusing is that while the story is on the cover of this week’s issue, the online version says it was published 02/12/2001?! Was it just found or was it four years ago? Talk about shoddy reporting! Can’t trust nobody! (And unfortunately there is no ‘Atiqot or IAA report on this exciting discovery!)

The Jewish Exponent has just published an Op-Ed piece by Jonathan S. Tobin that politicizes the recent discovery in the City of David excavations. Here is an excerpt that takes academics to task:

“Now, the Stones Will Speak”
Discovery offers glimpse of both ancient Israel and the travails of the modern state.
…
But though few in this country outside of academia have noticed, the notion of Israel being the historical homeland of the Jewish people has been under attack from far more reputable sources. In recent decades, a new front in the war on Israel was opened in intellectual journals and classrooms. Its goal? To trash the notion that the Bible’s accounts of the history of ancient Israel have the slightest value, and to debunk the idea that the United Kingdom of David ever existed.

For a growing number of academics and intellectuals, King David and his kingdom, which has served for 3,000 years as an integral symbol of the Jewish nation, is simply a piece of fiction.
…
But last week, the debunkers of Jewish history got some bad news. And all it took was for a dedicated archaeologist to start digging.

It is never a dull day…

Just received the latest Religious Studies Review (Vol. 30, Num. 4, October 2004 — hmm… a tad behind I see!). It has a few review essays that caught my eye:

• From Theological to Cinematic Criticism: Extricating the Study of Religion & Film From Theology, by Christine Hoff Kraemer (pp. 243-250).
• Globalizing Christology: Jesus Christ in World Religious Context, by Amos Yong (pp. 259-266).
• The Origins of the Disciplines of Biblical Archaeology and Biblical Studies, and Their Early Politicization, by Rachel Hallote (pp. 277-282).

As you can discern from its title, the essay on film and religion is concerned that such studies are “still submerged in Christian confessional concerns” and therefore need “to draw more heavily on religious traditions other than Christianity and on secular film and culture techniques.” Fair enough, though in my institutional context the interaction between film and Christianity is still centre stage (In my course on Religion and Popular Culture I will be dealing with the representation of other religious traditions in film and television, using Bend it Like Beckham, The Chosen, and, of course, The Simpsons, as some examples).

The essay on Jesus explores a number of christological works that consciously interact with the world religious context, while the essay on “biblical” archaeology looks at the beginnings of such scholarship and how it relates to where the field of archaeology stands today. (Noting, of course, the irony that the very biblically-oriented faith which inspired the pioneers of archaeology is being actively excluded today).