Books & Culture articles from September 2001

Books & Culture archives from September 2001

LETTERS.
September 1, 2001... Editor's Note: Shrekked Of all the pieces we've published this year, none has provoked as passionate a response as Eric Metaxas's review of Shrek, the summer hit that is now second only to The Lion King in the all-time box-office rankings for...

After Our Likeness.(human life)
September 1, 2001... At the end of his interesting book Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Harvard Univ. Press, 2001), Simon Cole turns to DNA typing. Skeptical of the claims made for fingerprinting, he's not impressed by...

Artificial Creation.(Spielberg's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence)
September 1, 2001... Ending a three-year hiatus with a much-hyped new sci-fi film, Steven Spielberg is back, and better still, he is back in familiar territory. After years of "stretching" to heavy-duty subject matter--the Holocaust, slave ships, and Normandy...

Artificial Creation.(digital actors)
September 1, 2001... When the film industry was in its infancy, the mere presence of "moving pictures" was enough to keep audiences spellbound. A pre-1900 viewer marveled at a film that simply showed a seashore: amazing, he said, how much the waves on the screen...

Who Killed Classical Music?(orchestra crisis)
September 1, 2001... And can marketing magic bring it back to life? The orchestra's work week begins with an educational concert in a suburban elementary school. The 27 players of the orchestra "core" -- full-time, contracted musicians-- wait at their...

The Warden of Time and Space.(Sir Isaac Newton)
September 1, 2001... Sir Isaac Newton: genius, heretic and SOB. Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night. God said "Let Newton Be" and all was light. Alexander Pope In 1685 James II was proclaimed King of England. A aggressive Catholic, he...

To the Jews First.(evangelization)
September 1, 2001... Jewish evangelization from the heyday of dispensationalism to the rise of Messianic Judaism. The evangelization of Jews was back in the headlines last May, when moderate Baptist pastor Steve Jones and the congregation of Southside...

Future Perfect.(Protestant theologian Wolfhart Pennenberg)(Interview)
September 1, 2001... A conversation with Wolfhart Pannenberg. DOGMA: 1. That which is held as an opinion; a belief principle, tenet; esp. a tenet or doctrine authoritatively laid down by a particular church, sect, or school of thought; sometimes...

Danger! Christian Ethics.
September 1, 2001... Religious ethics is one of the last strongholds of liberal Protestantism in the academy. Christian ethics probably sounds like a good idea to most people. You take Christianity, and then you find out what kind of ethics it promotes....

Jamming with the Seraphim.(Theology, Music and Time)(Review)
September 1, 2001... Can we find models for theology in music? Everybody is aware of mutual recriminations between artists and the church. Members of the church criticize one and another piece of art as perverse, sacrilegious, destructive of faith and morals;...

How Was Jesus God?(Review)
September 1, 2001... A new reading of the New Testament shows that the earliest Christology is also the highest. The virtues of this superb book lie as much in its critique as in its constructive proposal. In a thin volume--compressed from his Didsbury...

A Paleofundamentalist Manifesto for Contemporary Evangelicalism.
September 1, 2001... Especially its elites -- in North America. If Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and the remaining books of the Bible offer theologies that vary according to the different circumstances in and for which these books were written (without any...

Professor of Death.(Peter Singer)
September 1, 2001... Peter Singer and the scandal of "bioethics." In 1998, after a long search, Princeton University announced the appointment of the Australian philosopher Peter Singer, effective July 1, 1999, to fill a newly established chair as Ira W....

Edward Said: Secular Protestant.
September 1, 2001... Edward Said may be the world's most famous English professor, and its most famous Palestinian after Yasir Arafat. In the academy, he is best known for his influential critique of "Orientalism," that is, of those images and judgments by means...

The Strange Decade of the Promise Keepers.
September 1, 2001... The revealing story of the rise and fall but continued existence of Coach Mac's Christian men's movement. Imagine a future historian or sociologist attempting to capture the status of American Christianity at the turn of the twenty-first...