TruthBook Religious News Blog

The horrors of the Holocaust. The world wars and what they meant on the home front. These are topics that historian Jean Pedersen teaches her students at the University of Rochester and Eastman School of Music. Still, as a matter of faith, she believes that even in the darkest moments of human history, God is there.

”I pray that I might be able to find those moments of light in the darkness … to know that there is, because of God, always reason to hope,” she says.

Women’s history, which was celebrated this month, hasn’t always been filled with joyous moments, either, but the women of today — the women making the history of tomorrow — have hope for their families, hope for their country, hope for healing and peace.

And hope for their prayers, even when life seems to be a labyrinth.

”I pray as a mother, embracing the world as a mother embraces her child,” says Patricia E. LaRosa, an Episcopalian who lives in Rochester. “There are so many places of war and struggle and pain, so I hold the world in my arms and reassure it that there is still hope because of a mother’s love. … Mothers are powerful pray-ers. Mothers are powerful people — whether you are a biological mother or not.”

Prayer brings out the very nature of women, which is often nurturing and full of unconditional love, says Walesia Cates, a physician, national lecturer and author of Holy Spirit Mother.

”The prayers that we pray tell us of our own need,” she says. “It’s just like authors: They write the books that they need to read.”

Historically, women have been marginalized in spiritual activities, Cates says, and that’s why she believes women’s prayers have the deepest hope. “Our prayers were more in a survival mode, but now we’re moving past that to a flourishing mode.”

Women today are more confident spiritually, she says, adding that instead of looking to men for answers, women are approaching God and understanding where their power comes from.

Relationships and social concerns tend to dominate.

The prayers of Poonam Mehta, a third-grade teacher at Rochester’s School 35, are proof of that.

”I pray for a less challenging and materialistic society,” says Mehta, who is a Hindu. “I pray that we spend time and be passionate with our children to ensure they will have a healthy youth and healthy future.”

Gerhardt’s own prayer life changed four years ago when 9-month-old Virginia Joy joined her home. Now many of her prayers center on her daughter. And her daughter prays for her, too.

Gerhardt loves listening to Virginia’s prayers, which lately have mentioned Virginia’s grandfather, who is ill. But one of Gerhardt’s favorite memories is when Virginia said, “Mommy, when I pray it feels like God is laughing in my heart.”

”I think women are very consistent when it comes to things like this,” Alfreda Brown says. “When women pray, it’s like a support group. There’s an emotional attachment to prayer.”

”People want to see spirituality in the normalness of life,” says Sue Staropoli, who for years has been encouraging people to keep gratitude journals — even before Oprah Winfrey made them popular. “If we believe God is continually showering us with blessings, how many have we received?”

Sister Ann Caufield, one of the Sisters of Mercy, is often thankful that she can get out of bed. Arthritis makes the mornings challenging for a woman who volunteers to make prayer shawls.

”Work is also a prayer,” Caufield says, mentioning feeding and clothing the poor. “When you put your heart and soul into it, God works through you.”

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Spiritual Books Dominate Bestseller List

A religious and spiritual revival is hitting the top of the best-seller list.

Four of the top eight titles on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list deal with religious issues.

Such sales may reflect a "widespread spiritual yearning," says Bill Anderson, president of the CBA, formerly the Christian Booksellers Association. They're "extra-biblical," he says, not what evangelicals consider the literal truth.

HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman says it's "reaching beyond evangelicals to a lot of other Christians. . . . Look at the numbers." Zondervan CEO Bruce Ryskamp says 9/11 "stirred the souls of people to ask, 'What is this all about?' In the '90s, a lot of people made a lot of money but found it didn't always buy long-term happiness."

But James Martin, a Catholic priest and an editor of America, a Jesuit magazine, says most religious best sellers are "theology lite. Like fast food, some is nourishing, most of it isn't. But it's easily digested and makes few demands."

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Survey Says Spirituality in College on the Rise

A recent Higher Education Research Institute study has found a high interest in spirituality and religion among students, but reported a lack of faculty support for students' spiritual quests.

The nationwide survey used a sample of 3,680 undergraduate students at 46 colleges and universities. Students first completed a survey when they entered college in the fall of 2000 and took a second survey in their junior year in the spring of 2003.

Among the participants, 78 percent reported that they discussed religion or spirituality with friends, 77 percent reported that they prayed, and 70 percent said they had attended religious services in the last year.

The survey also offered statistics on faculty support of religious quests. Sixty-two percent of students said that their professors never encouraged discussion of religious or spiritual matters, and 56 percent said their professors didn't provide any opportunities to discuss the 'meaning of life.'

Though the survey reported an increase in student interest in spirituality, it reported a decline in actual religious practice.

The number of students who said it was "essential" or "very important" to integrate spirituality into their life increased from 2000-2003 from 51 percent to 58 percent, but the number of students rating themselves above average in spirituality declined from 47 percent to 39 percent, and the percent of people frequently attending religious services went from 52.1 percent to 29.4 percent.

Chaplain Jewelnel Davis, Columbia University, said this statistic is common at most universities because of the nature of expanding religious horizons.

"There's a widening of the box," she said. "You might have come in saying 'I'm Baptist,' but as you explore, you might say 'I'm Christian and open to other things.'"

Davis said that she mostly comes in contact with students of this nature who are confused about their religious identities.

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Friday, March 19, 2004

Analysts Reinterpret Role Of Religion, Spirituality

Although psychoanalysts once took a dim view of spirituality and religion, deeming them infantile and psychologically unhealthy, some analysts are now studying the topics and discussing them with patients.

Half a century ago, the subjects of spirituality and religion were anathema in the realm of psychoanalysis, Mortimer Ostow, M.D., a psychoanalyst from the Bronx, N.Y., said at the American Psychoanalytic Association meeting in New York City in January.

"It has been the practice of analysis to ignore religious associations," he said. This is not good, he asserted.

Spirituality is a "reaching out" to a natural or religious source, Ostow said; one feels in touch with a transcendent object. Spirituality is a regression to an early phase of childhood development. It is like an infant yearning for its mother.

Spirituality and religion are not the same, Ostow continued. Spirituality exists prior to religion in a person. The spiritual experience is affect; religion is cult, ritual, myth, morality. "Spirituality has nothing to do with morality," he said.

Prayer, at least Jewish prayer, is essentially a mantra—a talking to God, Ostow explained. It is a desire to speak out and to be heard.

Mystical experiences "are typically altered states of consciousness," Leon Wurmser, M.D., a Towson, Md., psychoanalyst reported. "Such trancelike states," he explained, "necessarily entail large-scale denial. . . . Although one hears and sees, the content of what is seen and heard is being treated so as if one had not heard or seen it. . . . It is thus a matter of making its emotional, affective meaning invalid. . . . "

Mystical experiences, however, are not the same as psychotic experiences, Ostow stressed. For instance, whereas the psychotic hallucination is enduring, the mystical vision is transient. And in most mystical experiences there is a revelation, whereas if psychotic hallucinations contain a revelation, which is rare, it will be a pseudo-revelation.

"Mysticism," Wurmser continued, "tries to find access to the mysteries of ‘being’ with the help of a world of images, feelings, thoughts, and wishes of inwardness. It may come as ecstatically exalted erotic love without physical sexuality, rather known from Christian and Muslim mysticism. . . . In contrast certainly to Christianity, Jewish mysticism (as Judaism in general) values sexuality in its physical form very highly. . . ."

Some analysts attending the psychoanalytic association meeting also broached the subject of whether analysts should address patients’ spiritual and religious needs.

Hamm reported that she has a number of patients who want to talk about spirituality or religion. "The way I handle it is, I ask questions," she explained. "I’m very curious about it." Another analyst reported that discussing religion with a patient helped the patient seek forgiveness.

Ostow said that he does not introduce the subjects of spirituality and religion into analytic sessions, but if patients bring them up, he discusses such subjects with them.

In fact, Ostow attested, discussing spirituality and religion with patients sometimes furthers the analytic process. For example, he once had a patient describe what appeared to be a spiritual experience. He confronted the patient about it, and then the patient started to change for the better—it was a turning point in his analysis.

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Gallup Poll: Two-Thirds Unhappy With Country's Moral Climate

An annual Gallup Poll found that nearly two-thirds of Americans are dissatisfied with the country's moral and ethical climate, while younger people seem to be less pessimistic.

Gallup's annual Mood of the Nation poll found that 64 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the country's moral climate, while 35 percent say they are satisfied.
Pollsters say the "fairly dim view" on American morality was likely influenced by corporate scandals involving Enron and Martha Stewart, Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" at the Super Bowl halftime show and increasing attention paid to gay marriage.

Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 seem more optimistic -- in the 2003 and 2004 polls, 53 percent of younger Americans said they are satisfied with the country's morality. Among older adults, the highest level of satisfaction -- 38 percent -- was found among those ages 30 to 49. Among Americans ages 65 and older, only 29 percent were satisfied.

Gallup contributing editor Heather Mason said the generational divide is "a pattern that has existed for several years."

"Adults under the age of 30 grew up in the era of the Internet, music videos and cable television shows that continued to push the moral envelope, and may not remember a time when profanity and sexual content were more taboo," she said in Gallup's Tuesday Briefing report.

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Thursday, March 18, 2004

South African Cosmologist Wins $1.4 Million Templeton Religion Prize

George F.R. Ellis, a South African cosmologist and mathematician who is equally at home in the realm of social criticism and political activism, is the winner of the 2004 Templeton Prize, arguably the most prestigious award for advancing understanding of religion and spirituality.

Ellis, a Quaker whose work on the origins of the universe have won him great scientific acclaim and whose anti-apartheid writings won him the ire and condemnation of South Africa's white-minority government during the 1970s and 1980s, becomes the 34th Templeton laureate.

With the honor of winning the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities, the award's full title, comes an award of 795,000 pounds sterling, the equivalent of more than $1.4 million, making it among the largest annual monetary prizes given to individuals.

Ellis teaches applied mathematics at the University of Cape Town and is a specialist in general relativity theory. Though not by his own admission as well known as others in the field -- the famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking was an early colleague of Ellis' -- the South African scholar has recently won acclaim for theorizing about the actual start of the universe and whether, in fact, there may be more than one universe.

At Wednesday's announcement, Ellis said he believes that such dialogue "fundamentally shapes the way we see the universe and how we understand our own existence." "The way in which science and religion by and large complement each other is becoming ever clearer," he said, "as are the natures of the various points of tension between them, and some possible resolutions of those tensions."

Mandela and Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Ellis said, represent a tradition of nonviolence begun by Mahatma Gandhi and furthered by Martin Luther King Jr. that has had a transformative effect on the world -- turning "an enemy into a friend" and, as a result, exemplifying "the true nature of security," he said in the interview.

The political is bound to the religious and even has implications for science, Ellis said, noting that individuals as well as communities need the balance of scientific rationality with the hope of religious faith. "Faith and hope fit into a full human life," he said.

In his remarks Wednesday, Ellis said the "real issue" was how best to balance the rationality of science with the hope that undergirds faith and sometimes defies rationality. He cited South Africa's recent history as a key example of "confounding the calculus of rationality."

"There were very many times in the past when it was rational to give up all hope for the future -- to assume that the nation would decay into a racial holocaust that never happened," he said. "It did not occur because of the transformative actions of those marvelous leaders Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela."

Two of the books Ellis has co-authored reveal the unusual breadth of his thought and concerns: "The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time," a 1973 volume written with Hawking, is a seminal work in the field of cosmology, while "The Squatter Problem in the Western Cape," a 1977 work co-written with three other South Africans, was a study on homelessness and a plea for a policy change by the ruling white Nationalist government.

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Wednesday, March 17, 2004

Gibson breaks Hollywood's 10 Commands

By following his own path now with "Passion," Gibson orchestrated a success story that could serve as a case study for film schools for years to come. Beyond that, Gibson should profit for years to come since as a period piece costume drama "Passion" can enjoy an Easter afterlife in theaters from now till doomsday.

Because "Passion" will be timely to re-issue theatrically at Easter for years to come, it has the potential to wind up as the biggest grossing film in movie history -- at least if you calculate that record on the basis of the cumulative gross from multiple releases of the same film. To do so, it will have to overtake "Titanic's" roughly $1.8 billion worldwide total, which seems possible in the future, but isn't likely on the basis of "Passion's" initial release. If "Passion" winds up with somewhere between $1 billion and $1.2 billion worldwide this time around, it's possible that well planned reissues down the road could send it sailing past "Titanic."

In breaking or bending so many of Hollywood's basic rules Gibson showed considerable courage that's paid off big-time for him. It's doubtful that he envisioned the level of monetary success the film has enjoyed or even that money was a driving force for him. His personal passion for the project seems very genuine whether one agrees or disagrees with the specific nature of his religious point of view. Moreover, given reports of how distributors around town turned down the chance to release "Passion," it's clear that nobody saw this as being the moneymaker it's become.

Here's a quick look at the Ten Commands Gibson opted not to obey and how not doing so helped turn "Passion" into a blockbuster.

1. Thou shalt use other people's money to finance your movie.

Traditionally Hollywood considers anyone who puts his own money into financing a movie to be a sucker (or, I believe, in Aramaic "an investor"). In Gibson's case, his personal passion for "Passion" was so great and apparently so unshared by the Hollywood community that there was no other way this film would have gotten made other than with his own money.

2. Thou shalt let a good film speak for itself by screening it early for the media.

The less people know about something the greater the controversy over it is likely to be. By refusing to show "Passion" to the groups that were insisting on seeing it, Gibson kept everybody riled up enough to provide fuel for the media frenzy over whether "Passion" is or isn't anti-Semitic.

3. Thou shalt keep network television advertising at the heart of a film's marketing campaign.

In the case of "Passion," Gibson didn't have that kind of money to spend on marketing nor did he choose to pour it down the network drain.

The grassroots marketing effort that Gibson undertook for "Passion" initially on his own and later through Newmarket Films was a lean one that relied on reaching the film's core audience of Christian moviegoers and potential moviegoers by getting local church groups to promote seeing the film. Gibson was smart to resist the temptation to write a check for, say, another $15 million to try to duplicate a major studio campaign revolving around network TV spots.

4. Thou shalt hold press junkets because they're the best way to generate publicity.

A press junket for "Passion" would have had Gibson sitting in a hotel room chair with a poster for the film on an easel beside him and a plant on a table behind him looking like it was growing out of his head. Whatever answers Gibson might have given to the typically inane questions that get asked at such junkets, they would not have driven people to see his movie the way television reports about the controversy raging over the then unseen film did.

5. Thou shalt honor thy superstars by paying them big bucks to generate big opening weekend ticket sales.

Bottom line, by skipping star casting Gibson was able to bring his film in for around $30 million. Add one superstar to that budget and you'd wind up with around $60 million, figuring a $25 million salary and another $5 million in related costs for the entourage and perks that accompany big stars these days.

6. Thou shalt avoid R ratings, subtitles, strange languages, blood & gore and graphic violence because they limit a film's audience.

The conventional wisdom in Hollywood has for years been that R ratings aren't so great because they serve to limit a film's audience by excluding people under the age of 17 (unless they're accompanied by a parent or guardian). Gibson clearly rejected the idea of writing and filming "Passion" so that it would land a PG-13 rating. That just wasn't going to be the movie he wanted to make and, to his credit, he refused to compromise. He put his money where his mouth was and took the risk of failing.

7. Thou shalt screen your film at festivals to attract a strong independent distributor.

Gibson was smart to resist any temptations to unveil "Passion" at a major film festival.

8. Thou shalt rely on a platform release in New York and L.A. to get word of mouth going.

Gibson was right to figure that the U.S. media centers of New York and L.A. wouldn't give "Passion" the kind of reception it needed to survive. That response could only come from the heartland where the core audience for the movie could be found.

9. Thou shalt covet promotional partners in fast food, fashion, cosmetics, toys and video games because they add big dollars to your marketing campaign and generate awareness for your film.

As important as Hollywood thinks fast food and other tie-in promotional campaigns are, Gibson perceived that these were things to stay away from. The movie's staggering success proves, however, that you can do quite well without having a film's title plastered all over buckets of fried chicken or fast food trays.

10. Thou shalt control your destiny as a filmmaker by worshipping the golden idols of Wall Street to raise money for your own major studio.

With his investment in "Passion" having paid off, he can now finance the production and marketing of any similar scale movie he ever wants to make. By doing so, he'll once again be the sole owner of his movie. If he can get lightning to strike again at the boxoffice, he can take in another ton of money -- like the $350 million to $500 million in profits "Passion" seems likely to bring him -- and have the satisfaction of having done it on his own terms.

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Monday, March 15, 2004

Hollywood Rethinking Films of Faith After 'Passion'

As the overwhelming success of "The Passion of the Christ" reverberates through Hollywood, producers and studio executives are asking whether the movie industry has been neglecting large segments of the American audience eager for more openly religious fare.

During the weekend the film took in another $31.6 million, increasing the total box office to $264 million in nearly three weeks, according to Exhibitor Relations, which tracks ticket sales.

Unlike many blockbusters, the movie has not dropped precipitously soon after a huge opening weekend. It is expected to finish its domestic run taking in well over $300 million in box-office receipts, easily outstripping big-budget movies like "The Hulk" or any in the "Matrix" series.

That number will only swell when the film is released internationally, beginning in Europe and Latin America in the next few weeks. The foreign audience is expected to be huge. And 20th Century Fox is in negotiations to distribute the DVD and videocassette, which is also expected to be immensely profitable.

"You can't ignore those numbers," said Mark Johnson, a veteran film producer. "You can't say it's just a fluke. There's something to be read here."

The movie's box-office success has been chewed over in studio staff meetings and at pricey watering holes all over Hollywood, echoed in interviews with numerous executives in the last week. In marketing departments the film is regarded as pure genius; its director, Mel Gibson, is credited with stoking a controversy that yanked the film from the margins of the culture to center stage, presenting it as a must-see.

In the first days after its release on Feb. 25 (Ash Wednesday) "The Passion" drew large numbers from religious groups whose members had bought blocks of tickets. Since then exit polls conducted by the movie's distributor, Newmarket Films, have found that young moviegoers have made up much of the audience.

"The R rating is limiting younger kids, but it is getting teens and college kids," Newmarket's president, Bob Berney, told Variety last week.

The movie is also doing well among the traditionally religious Latino and African-American audiences, Mr. Berney said.

Last week a Gallup poll found that 11 percent of Americans had seen the movie and that 34 percent more said they planned to see it in theaters. The poll, based on a statistically representative sample of 1,005 adults nationwide, found that older people were less likely to see the movie and that people who attended church at least once a month were more likely to see it than those who did not.

One indication of how Hollywood might find a middle road is in the recent announcement by the Walt Disney Company of its plan to make a big-budget movie of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," the beloved children's book by C. S. Lewis, an influential Christian writer. The rights to make a movie of the book are owned by a production company owned by the media mogul Philip Anschutz, a practicing Christian.

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Sunday, March 14, 2004

New Theory: Universe Created by Intelligent Being

On any given starry night thousands, perhaps millions, of people crane their necks skyward and allow their minds to swirl around two fundamental questions: Are we alone, and why are we here?

According to a lawyer and science enthusiast in Portland, Oregon, not only is the universe full of life, but some of it may be intelligent beyond our wildest imagination. He also says that collectively as intelligent beings we are entwined in our ultimate destiny: to give birth to another universe.

"Intelligent life is, in essence, the reproductive organ of the cosmos," said James Gardner, the lawyer who moonlights as a scientist. He has pulled together his theory—called the selfish biocosm—from the disparate fields of physics, biology, biochemistry, astronomy, and cosmology.

Gardner has published pieces of his theory in several peer-reviewed scientific journals and wraps it together in his recently published book, Biocosm: The New Scientific Theory of Evolution: Intelligent Life Is the Architect of the Universe.

Though Gardner admits the theory is speculative and out-there in the literal and figurative senses, it is grounded enough in serious research to at least tickle the fancy of some of the world's most respected scientists.

Life-Friendly Universe

The selfish biocosm theory begins with the premise that the universe is life friendly. It is not a hostile place full of black holes, uninhabitable planets, and the emptiness that somehow, randomly, allowed intelligent life to evolve on Earth, Gardner says.

Among Gardner's evidence for the life-friendly nature of the universe is that the big bang apparently had just the right amount of force to allow the universe to expand at a pace perfectly suited for the evolution of life. If the big bang had gone off with more force, the cosmos would, by now, be empty: If there had been less force the universe would have collapsed, Gardner said.

Another factor for the life-friendly nature of the universe is the ease with which carbon—the basis for life and the emergence of intelligence—forms. Also, the universe's three-dimensional structure allows life as we know it to exist.

"Collectively this stunning set of circumstances renders the universe eerily fit for life and intelligence," Gardner said last month during a presentation of his selfish-biocosm theory at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City.

Gardner believes that eventually life and intelligence will evolve to the point where it is capable of figuring out how to create, or give birth to, another universe, just as he believes an earlier universe gave birth to our universe.

As the progeny of an earlier universe, the cosmic equivalent of DNA is stitched into our universe, providing a recipe for development and a blueprint for the construction of offspring, according to Gardner.

When it comes to the issue of ultimate origins, Gardner said his theory becomes its most speculative. He postulates a closed time-like curve wherein the universe serves as its own mother. But he has other theories as well.

"I feel somewhat tempted by the approach [Charles] Darwin took when questioned about the origin of life," Gardner said. "The whole matter, Darwin remarked famously, is far too profound for the human intellect; a dog might as easily contemplate the mind of Newton."

Proof of Theory?

According to Gardner, key among the consequences of the life-friendly nature of the universe is that we humans ought to encounter life and intelligence as we explore the cosmos. Such an encounter would help prove the selfish biocosm theory, he said.

"In some sense it's a test, but it's not rigorous," Shostak said. "It's hard to prove that nobody is out there and it may be hard to find them even if they are there."

Other tests put forward by Gardner include detecting the evolution toward intelligence in nonprimate species, the evolution of artificial life into what is called a "conscious artifact," and the emergence of transhuman intelligence—the evolution of ever higher levels of intelligence on Earth, such as a community of humans and machines that is more intelligent than humans are alone.

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Saturday, March 06, 2004

Glossy `Biblemag' Hopes to Lure Teen Boys Into the Good Book

Sex advice, music reviews and tips on looking good ... no, it's not the latest issue of GQ or Maxim. It's the Bible -- for the mind of a teen-age guy.

"Refuel" is the New Testament that looks like an entertainment magazine, and it hits secular and religious bookstores in April. Featuring quizzes and dating hints alongside the Word of God, Refuel caters to young Christian men who aren't otherwise reading Scripture.

"It really was birthed from research we did that said teens don't read the Bible because it's too big and too intimidating," said Laurie Whaley, a spokesperson for Thomas Nelson Inc., the publisher of Refuel. "We removed the intimidation factor, so it's fun -- and it's a Bible."

Refuel comes on the heels of the Revolve Bible, a Bible-magazine published for adolescent girls last year by Thomas Nelson. Revolve's magazine format, complete with glossy pages and pictures of smiling young teens on the cover, was the first "Biblemag" created. After only six months in stores, it boasted higher sales than any other Bible sold in 2003. Now, Refuel is poised to dominate the hard-to-please teen male market.

"We've had so many requests for it, which really surprised me," said Kate Etue, managing editor of Revolve and Refuel. "We literally had hundreds of e-mails from guys telling us they were reading Revolve, and asking for a Revolve for boys."

Girls, sex and dating were the top things guys said they most wanted biblical advice about when surveyed by Refuel's editors. Experts and interviews with teen girls offer some answers, all with a scriptural base. "We don't shy away from things the church won't talk about -- drugs, oral sex, suicide, tattoos," Whaley said. "Teens from across the world are asking about these things."

Some experts see these Bibles as simple evangelism tools Christian teens can bring to their peers. "My instinct is that kids who are interested in their faith will maybe look at it and show it to their friends," said Christian Smith, director of the National Study on Youth and Religion at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose research on teens and religion prompted Thomas Nelson to create Revolve and Refuel.

With Revolve still selling more than five times the rate publishers anticipated and online pre-orders already mounting for Refuel, Thomas Nelson expects strong sales for its newest Biblemag.

Other companies are catching on. Zondervan, the world's largest publisher of Bibles and Christian books, created two new teen Bibles, "Revolution" for guys and "True Images" for girls, both targeting the same 13-17 age range as Revolve and Refuel. Published last November, the Bibles (which are printed in traditional, not magazine, format) are enjoying higher-than-anticipated success by "playing off of" Revolve's high sales, said Zondervan President Paul Caminiti.

"There's been a kind of convergence, and together they're doing quite well," he said. "I don't think their success made ours successful. The end result has been a lot of attention, and we're pleased with it."

Zondervan developed the Bibles for media-saturated teen minds, with features like "challenge notes"--informative sidebars in the Bible's pages that resemble instant messages. The Bibles each have Web sites with resources on issues like abortion and sexually transmitted diseases.

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Start of a Spiritual Revival?

A considerable increase of religious activity during the last 10 years may indicate a start of a spiritual revival in the United States, according to pollster George Barna.

He termed it significant "that we are witnessing a slow but steady development of more traditional religious behavior in the Western states." Trends "usually start in the West, take hold in the Northeast, then infiltrate the interior of the nation," he explained.

A recent poll by the Barna Research Group showed marked jumps in private, rather than public, religious activity, such as prayers, Bible study and participation in worship groups.

This might suggest that groups within mainline denominations "are taking the cue from the para-church movement," said Thomas C. Oden, a professor of theology and a leader of the confessional movement within the United Methodist Church.

According to Barna's survey, the share of adults reporting they had read from the Bible during the last week -- not including Sunday service -- rose from 37 percent in 1994 to 44 percent this year. It was in this category that the increase was most noteworthy in California, Oregon and Washington state, where Bible study among residents rose from 29 to 44 percent in the last decade.

Similarly, participation in small groups for prayer, Bible study and fellowship shot up from 11 percent to 26 percent in the West, Barna reported. Nationwide, it rose from 12 percent to 20 percent.

In this context, Barna noted a phenomenon that has been observed overseas as well: Men, traditionally less religiously engaged, are becoming more involved. In the United States, their participation in prayer and other groups doubled to 18 percent in the last decade.

Another piece of evidence for a possible religious revival is the rise in the number of people who said they had prayed to God in the last week from 77 percent in 1999 to 83 percent in 2004; no data for 1994 are available in this category.

Curiously, Barna found the steepest increase in prayer activity among those who identified themselves as atheists or agnostics, where it doubled to 20 percent in the last five years.

Atheists praying to God seem an oxymoron. Yet this phenomenon has been around for almost as long as such polls have been taken, lending credence to the claim that true atheists are a rare species. In the final analysis, they may just be agnostics who don't know if there is a God but still call on him "on spec."

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YOUNG LOVE, NEW CAUTION: More Teenagers Are Striving for Restraint

The teenage pregnancy rate in America, which rose sharply between 1986 and 1991 to huge public alarm, has fallen steadily for a decade with little fanfare, to below any level previously recorded in the United States. And though pregnancy prevention efforts have long focused almost exclusively on girls, it is boys whose behavior shows the most startling changes.

More than half of all male high school students reported in 2001 that they were virgins, up from 39 percent in 1990. Among the sexually active, condom use has soared to 65 percent for all male students and 67 percent among black ones. The trends are similar, if less pronounced, for female students, who remain slightly less likely than boys to report that they have had sex. Nowhere are the changes more surprising than in poor minority neighborhoods like Harlem and the Bronx, which a decade ago were seen as centers of a national epidemic of teenage pregnancy.

Researchers often sum up the findings in one tidy phrase: "less sex, more contraception." But there is nothing simple about their puzzlement over the reasons.

"The default position is `Yahoo, let's have sex,' " said Sarah Brown, director of the private, nonprofit National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. "It takes some motivation in a highly sexualized culture for teenagers not to have sex. To use contraception takes a lot of motivation."

"I think there's something very profound going on. I don't think anybody understands in depth this change in teen culture."

Experts can rattle off a litany of possible reasons for the turnaround: the fear of AIDS, and the impact of AIDS-prevention education; the introduction of injectable forms of birth control; changes in welfare policy and crackdowns on fathers for child support; the rise of a more religious and conservative generation of teenagers; an economic boom with more opportunities; and an array of new youth programs, especially those stressing both abstinence and contraception.

Even advocates of these developments agree that they cannot account for the shift, or predict how long it will last. Yet the cultural changes now at work are quite astonishing when viewed up close, in the lives of teenagers themselves. In their topsy-turvy world of explicit sex and elusive intimacy, young people yearning for human contact are distilling new codes of conduct from a volatile blend of sex education, popular culture and family experience.

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Friday, March 05, 2004

Christianity blossoms in China

With church pews packed beyond capacity, many Christians had nowhere to worship but at home. Secretive "house churches" operate throughout the vast country.

But last month, Chinese authorities announced groundbreaking for two churches in Beijing, the first to be built in the capital since the Communist Party took power in 1949, according to the state-run People's Daily newspaper.

Why is the officially atheist Communist government suddenly building churches?

"That's quite simple: the 2008 Olympics," said the Rev. Chan Kim-kwong, a historian of religion in China. "Everything started two years ago when Beijing got the Olympic games."

Although the Olympic summer games will last only two weeks, Chinese leaders are acutely aware that the impression the city will make on the world will last much longer. The Chinese Catholic Church, which is not affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church, plans to build a large national seminary in Beijing and has been giving language training to its clergy so they can celebrate Mass in German, French and other languages, Chan said.

"It's not just the games," he said. "It's the image of Beijing as an international city, an open, modern city."

Christianity has been growing rapidly in China. Official figures put the number of Protestants at 15 million and Catholics at 10 million. Tens of millions more Christians, including Roman Catholics loyal to the Vatican, belong to unauthorized churches.

Decades of political turmoil, intensified in recent years by jarring social changes and unbridled economic development, have frayed much of traditional Chinese culture.

"There is spiritual longing in society," said Gao Ying, a minister at the Chongwenmen Church in Beijing who has a degree from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif. "There are young people, intellectuals, seeking meaning."

Unless a church is registered with the state, as is the 5,000-member Beijing Gangwa Shi Christian Church, it's officially considered illegal. While many "house churches" are tolerated, their leaders are occasionally jailed.

The Rev. Yu Xinli, head of the Beijing Christian Council, said there are 700 to 800 house churches in the city, largely because the official churches are too full to accommodate all the worshippers. Beijing has nine Protestant churches for 40,000 followers, and attendance is growing at a rate of 1,000 a year, he said. There are at least 40,000 Chinese Catholics in Beijing and about 15 churches.

"Nowadays, on Sundays, some churches have to give five services a day to meet the needs," Yu said.

Compass Direct, a California-based Christian news service that reports on worldwide religious persecution, said last month an internal Chinese government survey found at least 3,000 unregistered churches in Beijing. Most had congregations of about 20 members, with churches dividing when they reached 70 to avoid detection by authorities.

"It was not news to Beijing, but maybe they were not aware of the extent of it," said Chan, who is also an executive of the Hong Kong Christian Council, which operates independently of religious authorities in Beijing.

One group they are not likely to lure are overseas returnees. Many young Chinese who worked or studied abroad are returning home and, increasingly, they're coming back as Christians. For the most part, they find the state-approved churches too old-fashioned, Chan said.

"Those are well-to-do people," he said. "They have connections. You don't touch them. I know there are many Christians there. They don't go to [government] churches. They meet in those big villas with chauffeurs."

The specter of a growing population of well-connected Christians — in sharp contrast to the conventional wisdom that the rising religious tide is concentrated in the countryside — is one that surely vexes the Chinese government.

Both Catholic and Protestant churches were extensive landowners before the Communist Party came to power. The decade-long Cultural Revolution saw much of their holdings shuttered, confiscated and nationalized. By the early 1980s, Chinese authorities eased their restrictions and the churches got some of their land back.

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Thursday, March 04, 2004

Will Hollywood green-light God?

With The Passion of the Christ faster out of the gate than The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King - $125.2 million in its first five days, $1.1 million more than the Oscar darling - Hollywood insiders are divided about the prospect of major-studio Bible tales filling the multiplex.

The blockbuster success of Mel Gibson's low-budget drama about the agonizing last hours of Jesus Christ leaves little doubt there is an audience hungry for films that feed the spirit.

"I happen to know of two biblical projects that [were] on hold, basically to see how The Passion opens," reports Barbara Nicolosi, who gave up her plans to become a nun and is now a film industry veteran who teaches screenwriters how to bring spirituality to their work.

"I think there are a lot of people who would like to do Bible stories who will now have a doorway into studio offices," Nicolosi says.

Gibson has not ruled out making more Bible films: "There are good stories in that book - it's worth looking into them," he told Variety.

"It's not out of the question," his Passion coproducer, Bruce Davey, added. "The people have spoken. It's what they want."

But the involvement of the major studios in religious films is by no means certain. He's boffo at the box office, but in Hollywood the Lord is too wholesome to be cool.

"It's not just about money," says writer-director Dave Alan Johnson, creator of Doc, a hit for the family-oriented Pax television network. "Especially for the creative executive ranks in the movie industry, it's about being hip and on the edge. Their standing in the club, how they are perceived by their peers, is the most important thing.

"It's the most insecure place on the planet," says Johnson, an Iowan who has lived in Los Angeles since 1980. "And they haven't got a clue about what most people in America value and want."

In the faith-based-film community, an alternative universe with its own festivals, production companies and distributors, Gibson's success is seen as a turning point in mass culture, if not a miracle.

The movie has already passed all modern Bible films at the box office, including DreamWorks' 1998 animated hit The Prince of Egypt, which took in $101.4 million. The 1956 spectacle The Ten Commandments is still the one to beat: Its $65.5 million domestic take translates into $789.9 million in today's dollars, according to boxofficemojo.com.

When Gibson went looking for financial backing, the moguls turned him down. Forced to pay his own way, he kept his budget to $30 million.

Linson says it wouldn't shock him in the least if some of the same executives who gave Gibson the brush-off now approach him with requests for another Gospel tale. "That's the way the business works," he says.

Before the film opened, analysts predicted it would make back its costs, but fade quickly at the box office. Its appeal was assumed to be limited to evangelicals, most in fly-over country. The fact that the movie was in Latin, Aramaic and Hebrew and unrelentingly violent made it unlikely that anyone would sit through it twice, analysts said.

"We're seeing repeat business already," Davey says.

People who are moved by the film aren't just telling others about it. They're returning to theaters with friends in tow.

"We're going across age groups and across ethnic groups," Newmarket president Bob Berney told Variety.

Newmarket is the independent distributor Gibson hired to get The Passion onto more than 4,600 screens in 3,000 theaters for its Ash Wednesday opening.

Confounding expectations, the film is playing well not just in the Bible Belt but in big cities, including New York and Los Angeles. The Passion is expected to draw audiences through Lent.

Can Hollywood repeat the phenomenon?

"The problem is, people who don't believe in the Bible tend to do a terrible job of re-creating it on film," Nicolosi says.

"Mel's film undeniably comes from a heart that has embraced the story of Jesus and that is theologically informed," Nicolosi says, though others - including Catholic theologians - have questioned his interpretation of Scripture. "There aren't a lot of other A-list directors in Hollywood for whom the Bible holds that same kind of place."

"I think biblical films are going to find their way back on the silver screen," said Melissa Richter, owner of Richter Strategic Communications in Toronto. Richter has promoted films including the Book of Revelation-based Left Behind: The Movie, a grassroots success for the faith-based movie company Cloud Ten Pictures.

"What remains to be seen is if major Hollywood studios are willing to take a leap of faith and produce films, either in partnership with a Christian film studio or alone, that will satisfy a massive Christian audience," she says.

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Wednesday, March 03, 2004

Cancer scare a gift for Lynn Redgrave

Most people would dodge a crisis. Not Lynn Redgrave. "I chose to change my life," the renowned actress told the audience at a lecture series at Roy Thomson Hall Monday night.

In fact, nothing -- not her Golden Globe Award, New York Film Critics Award or Oscar nomination for best actress -- could compare to the experiences the 60-year-old Redgrave had in the past year.

Being diagnosed with breast cancer 14 months ago has unexpectedly become the best thing in her life, she says, bringing her closer to her family, her soul and her spirituality.

"It gave me a chance to learn more about life . . . a sign to live fully."