December 14, 2007 | 1:29 pm

Hollywood goes to the Holy Land

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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Davis Guggenheim wasn’t raised Jewish, and he has long had trouble understanding what Israel means to him. But when he traveled there last month with a delegation of fellow entertainment decision makers, the director-producer realized instantly the centrality of Israel not just to his own life but to all humanity.

“It happens the minute you step off the plane: You just start to feel the history that has taken place there; the sense of time and history and the scale of human events is so huge, and it is easier to see your place in it,” said Guggenheim, who was an executive producer of “Training Day” and director and executive producer of “An Inconvenient Truth.” “In L.A., the scale of history is so short and miniscule and confusing because you don’t have any references of time and place. [Israel] feels like the nexus of history and the nexus of everything that is good about the future and everything that is potentially cataclysmic.”

Guggenheim was joined by former Paramount Pictures president Donald DeLine; George Freeman of the William Morris Agency; Nina Jacobson, former president of the Walt Disney Motion Picture Group; Amy Pascal, co-chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment and her husband, former New York Times writer Bernard Weinraub; and Brad Silberling, director of “Lemony Snicket’s: A Series of Unfortunate Events.” Sponsored by talent agent David Lonner and The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, the delegation of Hollywood heavy hitters landed in Tel Aviv the Friday before Thanksgiving, on the eve of the Annapolis peace conference, which added a bit of salience to their helicopter tour of the tiny slice of Mediterranean desert.

Here is the rest of this story I had in this week’s Jewish Journal. I wrote earlier this year about how Hollywood Jews are becoming a bit more comfortable publicly supporting Israel. Lonner, who is co-head of the motion picture department at the William Morris Agency, and former Consul General Ehud Danoch deserve a lot of credit for that.

December 14, 2007 | 10:51 am

Top 10 religion stories of 2007

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Time magazine has 50 top-10 lists for the year, and, of course, one of them focuses on religion stories.
10. South Korean missionaries kidnapped in Afghanistan.
9. The Creation Museum opens.
8. New Life Church struggles on.
7. Atheist books go bestseller.
6. Evangelicals go green.5. The Episcopal-Anglican schism over gays.
4. Pope Benedict XVI makes it easier to celebrate the Latin Mass.
3. Jerry Falwell dies.
2. Democrats find religion and Mitt Romney tries to shake his.1. Mother Teresa’s dark moments.

I can’t see I agree with all these selections or their arrangement. Somehow every major religion story last year either involved Christians or atheists,  and I find that hard to believe. What’s missing from this list?

Palestinian civil war and the Annapolis conference both made the Mideast top 10, but the intra-Jewish fight over the future of Jerusalem did not. Also worthy, how about the rise of Mike Huckabee and evangelical GOP dissension, God and the Colorado Rockies or Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week?

Coming soon: The Not Top 10 of 2007.

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December 13, 2007 | 5:26 pm

The art of intuition

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Last month, I sat down for a Q&A with Jonah Lehrer, who’s made quite a splash—if an expert on the intersection of art and neuroscience can do so—with his first book, “Proust Was a Neuroscientist.” The book was well-reviewed, and the LA Times just listed it one of the 25 best non-fiction books of the year. Here’s the first chapter.

To me, what makes Lehrer’s thesis so profound is it’s simplicity: We expect artists to explain in words and pictures human experiences long before science has caught up. But his understanding of the two, and his ability to weave them together, makes for a good read, even if a review in The Jewish Journal thought it was boringly obvious.

Here’s the beginning of my interview:

Jewish Journal: In your book, you are particular to refer to these works of art as intuitions, not predictions. Why?

Jonah Lehrer: [Art] is very different from science, which does try to predict the results of experiments—you generate hypotheses, you have control variables. These artists were very rigorous in their own sense. They were very sensitive observers of experience, but they weren’t trying to predict. They were trying to look at their experience, and introspect on it, and intuit on that. We tend to disregard experience and say, “Oh, that is just wishy-washy stuff.” These artists demonstrate that you can learn important things just by paying attention.

JJ: Toward the end of the book, you write, ‘You don’t even exist.’

JL: That is one of these surreal ideas of neuroscience, which is that there is no cell that represents you, there is no discreet circuit from which you emerge. You are just a distributed parallel processor. You’ve got all these neurons doing their thing and you emerge somehow simultaneously from this helter-skelter of activity.

At the same time, it’s not very meaningful to say that is all we are. Clearly we are self-conscious creatures. We feel like so much more, and there is a mystery there which science won’t be able to solve: How the water of the brain becomes the wine of the mind…. That is the question that art is uniquely able to interrogate and try to solve.

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December 13, 2007 | 4:03 pm

Undie Run: What have we done?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

That is a photo from LAist of last night’s Undie Run at UCLA. It’s been a “tradition” for Bruins to drop down to their drawers and jog off studying at midnight the Wednesday of finals week since spring 2002. And, as my wife just noted, this giant display of debauchery was, gulp, started by a few Christians.

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December 13, 2007 | 2:51 pm

‘Judge orders priest to recite Psalms for parking illegally’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

From CNN:

A judge in southern Chile has sentenced a Catholic priest to recite psalms daily during three months as punishment for a traffic violation.

Judge Manuel Perez said he issued the unusual sentence after Father Jose Cornejo said he could not afford the 50,000-peso ($100) fine that would have been the regular sanction for illegal parking in the city of Puerto Montt.

“He will have to recite seven psalms from a book in the Old Testament,” Judge Perez told the Santiago daily La Tercera.

“This is not a sentence that just occurred to me,” he added.

“I did it as a tribute to Galileo Galilei, one of the greatest scientists of all time, who received a similar sentence from the Catholic Church during three years for saying the Earth rotates around the sun.”

(Hat tip: Affad)

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December 13, 2007 | 1:02 pm

The better soda: latke or Christmas ham?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

This is one of those ideas you know was drummed up just for free press and white elephant gift exchanges. Why? Because nobody would otherwise think Egg Nog soda would sell well—and that was the best of the eight Jones Soda flavors that come in the Chanukah and Christmas packs.

After the Chanukah pack arrived at The Jewish Journal last month, I knew I wanted to contribute to the unnecessary discussion of whether your special someone really wants Christmas Ham soda. So I called Jones’ PR person half a dozen times and asked her to send a Christmas pack to our office. I wish I hadn’t.

A few weeks apart, we set up both gimmicks in the GeekHeeb‘s office and invited our colleagues to sample the holiday fare.

Latkes and jelly donuts might have tasted good last week, but not when they are liquefied and carbonated and, in the donut’s case, atomic pink. The apple sauce and chocolate coins (think Tootsie Rolls) flavors weren’t much better.

Yesterday, in the waning hours of Chanukah, I threw the Christmas pack in the fridge and got ready. I had been hungry all day. Surely I could pound a Christmas Ham, even one that came in a bottle and wasn’t called Spam.

I started with Sugar Plum and Egg Nog, the latter being better, in my mind, than the real thing. Then I moved on to Christmas Tree, which smelled like pine needles and went down like liquid Ben Gay.

Finally, Christmas Ham, the beverage I’d been waiting about a month to savor, or at least sample. All I can say is that after drinking a small cup of it, which I threw back like a shot, I immediately felt ill. The best way to describe the flavor: Imagine squeezing hot dogs dry and than carbonating that juice.

Happy holidays, Jones Soda.

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December 13, 2007 | 9:43 am

The young reporter and a really old dinosaur

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

So, some journalism dinosaurs have a problem with young reporters writing for Page One. Obviously as a young reporter I am biased, but I don’t see why news articles can’t be judged on merit instead of their author’s age. Anyway, one of the more interesting stories I’ve read in the LA Times in the past few years—“Adam, Eve and T. Rex”—was penned by Ashley Powers, who at the time was fairly fresh out of college.

Cabazon, Calif. - Dinny the roadside dinosaur has found religion.

The 45-foot-high concrete apatosaurus has towered over Interstate 10 near Palm Springs for nearly three decades as a kitschy prehistoric pit stop for tourists.

Now he is the star of a renovated attraction that disputes the fact that dinosaurs died off millions of years before humans first walked the planet.

Dinny’s new owners, pointing to the Book of Genesis, contend that most dinosaurs arrived on Earth the same day as Adam and Eve, some 6,000 years ago, and later marched two by two onto Noah’s Ark. The gift shop at the attraction, called the Cabazon Dinosaurs, sells toy dinosaurs whose labels warn, “Don’t swallow it! The fossil record does not support evolution.”

The Cabazon Dinosaurs join at least half a dozen other roadside attractions nationwide that use the giant reptiles’ popularity in seeking to win converts to creationism. And more are on the way.

“We’re putting evolutionists on notice: We’re taking the dinosaurs back,” said Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis, a Christian group building a $25-million creationist museum in Petersburg, Ky., that’s already overrun with model sauropods and velociraptors.

“They’re used to teach people that there’s no God, and they’re used to brainwash people,” he said. “Evolutionists get very upset when we use dinosaurs. That’s their star.”

The nation’s top paleontologists find the creation theory preposterous and say children are being misled by dinosaur exhibits that take the Jurassic out of “Jurassic Park.”

“Dinosaurs lived in the Garden of Eden, and Noah’s Ark? Give me a break,” said Kevin Padian, curator at the University of California Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley and president of National Center for Science Education, an Oakland group that supports teaching evolution. “For them, ‘The Flintstones’ is a documentary.”

Not far from Cabazon, in Yucca Valley, is another Christian public exhibit, Desert Christ Park. I wrote about the decaying statues years ago for The Sun, but I can’t find the article online or on LexisNexis. This isn’t it, but it covers the park’s constitutional and struggle.

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December 12, 2007 | 4:52 pm

Sibling spat: Mormons believe Jesus and Satan are brothers

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Get ready for an uproar, folks. Mike Huckabee apparently told a New York Times reporter that Mormons believe that Jesus and Satan were brothers. The story isn’t going to run until Sunday, but somebody leaked details to the Associated Press. AP has now moved a story suggesting that Huckabee’s a nut and an ignoramus for making such a crazy intolerant statement. There’s only problem—Huckabee is right…

That’s from my man in Arkansas, the Bible Belt Blogger. Read the rest here.

(Image: FrenBlog)

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December 12, 2007 | 12:29 pm

Pope attacks ‘climate change prophets of doom’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology.

The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering.

And I thought President Bush was a Methodist.

However, when the reporter for the Daily Mail got to the meat of the pope’s statement, which will be part of his message for World Peace Day in January, I had to agree.

“Humanity today is rightly concerned about the ecological balance of tomorrow,” he said in the message entitled “The Human Family, A Community of Peace”.

“It is important for assessments in this regard to be carried out prudently, in dialogue with experts and people of wisdom, uninhibited by ideological pressure to draw hasty conclusions, and above all with the aim of reaching agreement on a model of sustainable development capable of ensuring the well-being of all while respecting environmental balances.

“If the protection of the environment involves costs, they should be justly distributed, taking due account of the different levels of development of various countries and the need for solidarity with future generations.

“Prudence does not mean failing to accept responsibilities and postponing decisions; it means being committed to making joint decisions after pondering responsibly the road to be taken.”

 

In other papal news, the Vatican will issue Friday a doctrinal document on “some aspects of evangelisation.”

(Hat tip: Luke Ford)

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December 12, 2007 | 12:12 pm

Kevin Everett walks, even if it’s not on water

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

It’s difficult to imagine Kevin Everett, the Buffalo Bills tight end who was paralyzed only three months ago, recovering any quicker than he has. Some might call it a miracle. Whether divine intervention or medical innovation, Everett knows whom to thank:

If he has despaired, he does not admit it. Instead, he describes only a transforming strength that has come with his injury. “I look at my life in a whole new fashion,” says Everett. “You realize how blessed you are. You thank God even more when you wake up in the morning and for every little thing you have. I thank God for sparing my life and letting me be here for my family and my fiancée. I’ve been able to see how much people love me, and how much I love them.”

That’s from a long story Sports Illustrated published online yesterday, complete with a photo gallery that shows Everett walking in the park and working out at the gym. This for a guy who couldn’t even twitch a few days after incurring his injury in the season opener. Here’s how it begins:

Every step is precious now. Every movement is a gift. Every morning brings another sunrise, full of sweet promise. When Kevin Everett was a little boy growing up in Port Arthur, Texas, he would sit with his grandpa James Nico, and the older man would explain to him life’s lessons. One of them was this: Don’t ever be bitter. Just keep doing your best, even when things aren’t looking so good.

Even when you are lying, helpless and twitching, on the floor of a football stadium, unable to move your limbs and unable to take a deep breath. Even when you drift to the surface from a deep, chemically induced sleep two days later and find yourself in a hospital bed, with tubes in your throat and in your groin and machines beeping in every corner of the room and your mother gently rubbing your forearm, asking you through her tears, Baby, can you feel this? Please blink your eyes once if you can feel this.

You know I love you, don’t you, baby? Please blink once if you know. And you slowly blink once, though you don’t remember it.

Even when you’re at a rehabilitation hospital almost a month later and an occupational therapist puts a tiny, one-pound weight in your right hand and asks you to do one biceps curl with the same arm that once blocked NFL linebackers on Sunday afternoons. And you just can’t do it. Even when your life is unfathomably changed at the age of 25. Even then.

Here is Kevin Everett now, sitting at a breakfast table in a corner of the house the Buffalo Bills’ tight end bought last year for his family in the Houston suburb of Humble. His fiancée, Wiande Moore, a sprinter whom Kevin met when both were athletes at the University of Miami, sits to his left, and the two of them pick at the remnants of supper. His mother, Patricia Dugas, is in the kitchen putting the finishing touches on a Christmas gingerbread house with Kevin’s youngest sister, Davia, 11. His other two sisters—Herchell, 15, and Kelli, 14—are sitting nearby on family room couches in front of a wall-mounted TV tuned to MTV but muted because Herchell is tapping out a social studies paper on her laptop. It is a family place at a family time.

“I’ll tell you what,” says Kevin. “I’m still trying to figure out everything that’s happened in my life lately. But I don’t think anybody has life figured out. I know you’ve got to take the good with the bad, and you’ve got to be strong. Plain and simple. Just because you get knocked down doesn’t mean you’ve got to stay down. That’s what I feel about all of this. If you get knocked down, you’ve got to get back up.”

So he gets up. He rises from his chair and walks easily to the kitchen, opens the refrigerator and takes out a drink. Then he walks back. Simple as that. And yet not simple at all.

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December 12, 2007 | 10:14 am

The intersection of religion and politics

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

I just stumbled across this image from the the 2003 issue of Heeb  magazine, the one with the Beastie Boys on the cover. Here’s my question: Are religion and politics more or less intertwined today than they were four years ago?

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December 11, 2007 | 10:43 pm

‘Father killed daughter for not wearing hijab’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

This tragedy happened not in Saudi Arabia or Iraq but in Canada. From AFP:

Friends and classmates of a 16-year-old girl who police say was murdered by her devout Muslim father in a Toronto suburb told local media Tuesday she was killed for not wearing a hijab.

Police said in a statement they received an emergency call at 7:55 am local time Monday from “a man who indicated that he had just killed his daughter.”

The victim, Aqsa Parvez, was “rushed to hospital with life-threatening injuries, but tragically passed away late last night.”

Her father, Muhammad Parvez, 57, was arrested at the scene and will be formally charged with murder when he appears in court Wednesday, said police.

(skip)

According to her friends, Aqsa had worn the hijab at school last year, but rebelled in recent months.

They said she would leave home wearing a hijab and loose-fitting clothes, but would take off her head scarf and change into tighter garments at school, then change back before going home at the end of the day.
The victim’s 26 year-old brother was also charged with obstructing police in the investigation.

(Hat tip: GetReligion)

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