Did Prince Caspian get the right rating?
Cinematical’s Eric Snider thinks the “PG” is misleading.
… watch The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian and marvel at how such a violent movie magically got the kid-friendly PG rating.
I didn’t know the rating before I watched it, and I didn’t remember, off the top of my head, whether the first Chronicles of Narnia was PG. (It was.) As Prince Caspian unfolded, I noted that there was an awful lot of stabbing, throat-slitting, and other killing, though I also noted that it was almost entirely bloodless. I figured it was the lack of gore that had prevented the film from being rated R, and that it was instead a moderately violent PG-13.
So I was flabbergasted to discover afterward that it was rated PG.
Dark’s next
Stephen Lamb is blogging about hearing David Dark read a sneak preview of his upcoming book The Sacredness of Questioning Everything.
One point [Dark] kept returning to is “who’s really evangelical?” As I’ve mentioned before, I stay away from that label because of the negative connotations. But I’m hearing more and more people, like David, trying to reclaim the label. (Donald Miller is even identifying himself now as a Fundamentalist, trying to take back that label.) David said that too often, the vibe we get from the church is “I’m Christian, because I’m offended.” But we are called to something different, “we are called to better imagining,” not for ways to be offended and cry foul.
In David’s upcoming book, each chapter will be devoted to questioning a different thing. He mentioned questioning The Future, Being Offended, Religion, Government, and the Media; I think he said there will be ten or eleven chapters in all. He read an excerpt to us from one chapter on what he learned while watching Michael Scott on an episode of NBC’s The Office. He mentioned that, “what we call comedy is the space where everything can be talked about.”
A quote that has meant a lot to him recently is from John Howard Yoder – “Jesus has the power to unendingly meet new worlds.” And because of that, if we believe it is true, we don’t have to be afraid of things changing, of post-modernism or other shifts in our culture and in our lives…
Now I am REALLY interested in Nine. What a cast. But first I need to see 8 1/2. I started it a while back but never got around to watching it all the way through.
I’ve been waiting forever for them to put up a website and trailer for The City of Ember. I didn’t like the other books in that series so much, but I loved that one. It had a bit of a charm about it… Thanks for the link!
Jeff, Thanks for posting this. I do like Obama, but when it comes down to it, this issue really affects my feelings. I hate to be a one-issue voter, but this is a big issue. I guess all we can do is trust our country’s future to God!
ps–I got a WordPress account so I can leave comments!!
I’m not sure how much of a “pragmatist” Obama can be if he casts symbolic votes that send out “confusing” messages and thereby give his enemies more ammo against him.
One wonders what the effects of this sort of “pragmatism” might be on, say, the international scene — where Obama is apparently beginning to back-pedal on his earlier (symbolic? protest-vote?) claims that he would meet with terrorist-sponsoring dictators without preconditions.
FWIW, Alan Jacobs had this to say about Obama and abortion at his blog a couple months ago:
. . . So the situation I find myself in is not really a matter of policy, but of moral conviction. If a Presidential candidate supported slavery, even if I believed that he or she could do nothing to increase the prevalence of slavery, and even if I agreed with that candidate on a whole host of other issues, I simply could not vote that that candidate. And while (for a variety of reasons) I do not believe that people who get abortions are morally equivalent to people who own slaves, I think abortion and slavery are comparable moral evils. So, to my considerable regret, I will not be able to vote for Obama. The only question that remains for me is whether I will be able to vote for McCain.
In the comments, he adds:
. . . I consider the Bush administration’s support and practice of torture to disqualify it in just the same way that I think Obama’s support of abortion disqualifies him. That would have been a good point to make in my post.
Interestingly, one of the other comments there is written by someone who criticizes McCain for voting against an anti-torture bill not because he was pro-torture — McCain’s anti-torture — but because the anti-torture bill was badly written. That sounds interestingly similar to Josh’s defense of Obama’s reasons for voting against that one anti-infanticide bill.
With all due respect to Mssrs. Hurst and Kmiec, I can’t begin to understand how someone can claim to be concerned about abortion while simultaneously backing Obama. Obama is NOT pro-life nor is he pragmatically upholding the Constitution. He’s a man who believes that abortion should be legal and has even stated (in the context of a sex-ed discussion) that he’d hate for his own daughters to have to “be punished” for a mistake.
So he’ll listen to those of us who are pro-life? But when its time to take action, which legislators do via their votes, what does he do? Can anyone produce any evidence of a significantly important pro-life vote from him?
Abortion is far too entrenched in our culture as it is and electing Obama is only likely to solidify it even further, while we console ourselves that “at least he listened before changing nothing.”
Meanwhile, McCain’s legislative record is one of full and complete support for the unborn. I’m not a big fan for several reasons, but I cannot walk into a booth in November and in good conscience vote for someone who actively declines to defend the most helpless among us. Let’s at least give McCain credit for that. And in my case, he’ll be getting my vote as well.
Hi! I’ve been reading this blog for ages, but this is the first time I’ve posted a comment…actually, I’m surprised to find such a politically-charged discussion here! So I have to throw in my two cents:
I don’t think legislation alone will ever end abortion. Public opinion is clear on that one ‚Äî last year over 60% of Americans indicated that they support abortion rights (that number jumps to 88% in the case of saving the life of the mother).
I also believe that abortion is not a stand-alone issue, but is directly affected by economic policy, healthcare, education, and whole lot of other issues. Think about the main reasons women cite for having an abortion: more than two-thirds say they can’t afford to have a child. A majority of the rest cite not having health care for themselves or their children, and not having any support to carry a pregnancy to term or to care for their child.
What the abortion issue needs is not more “sanctity of life” rhetoric from pro-life organizations. We need to put feet to what we believe if we want to see change. We need policies that provide jobs and health insurance and support for prospective mothers; better education and more accessible birth control; changes in the adoption/foster care system to make it a more viable option for pregnant mothers.
The fact that Obama is not in favor of making abortion “illegal” is of less importance to me than the potential that he could actually create a cultural shift, and begin to eliminate the need for abortion, by addressing the underlying issues.
And frankly, while we’re at it, abortion isn’t the only issue on the table that deals with the sanctity of life. 16,000 children die DAILY around the world from starvation. Almost 3 million people die every year from HIV/AIDS. And we are involved in a questionable war that has already cost the lives of almost 4,000 US soldiers, injured 30,000, wreaked unknown civilian havoc on the people of Iraq, and put our country into excessive debt. Do we not, as Christians, have a moral responsibility to legislate change for these global issues, as well?