popular culture

Mexico may have experienced its own “Manson moment” last month when eight devotees of “ Santa Muerte” were arrested for the murder of three people, allegedly as human sacrifices. While the media has been fairly restrained in covering this event, these murders will likely have lasting consequences for alternative religion in North America. Like the Manson murders, the Santa Muerte murders present a concrete instance of violence that can be used to support much broader claims about the dangers of the religious and cultural Other.

Once a major factor in shaping the modern calendar, Easter has fallen in significance, to put it mildly, which is another reason I think it’s tops. I tend to like underdogs and faded glory. I live in Baltimore.

Rich’s approach to her religious identity was of a piece with her approach to every aspect of her identity. For Rich, any identity worth achieving involved struggle and resistance—be it national identity (“a patriot is one who wrestles for the / soul of her country / as she wrestles for her own being”), gender identity (“A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. / The beak that grips her, she becomes.”), or the committed poet’s identity (“She cannot teach the end of bonds; but she can refuse to justify, accord with, ignore their existence”).

Watching Higher Ground felt like catching a glimpse of a mythical creature I’d let myself imagine but never thought I’d see in real life. But suddenly there it was, projected on a big screen: sophisticated and complex theological thinking, a female protagonist interested in ideas and books and God, a friendship between two women that has very little to do with men and everything to do with trusting your body and your mind, and the insidious nature of religiously sanctioned sexism and its devastating effects.

Remember the movie Joyful Noise, the Dolly Parton and Queen Latifah flick about a small-town gospel choir from the South competing for national recognition?

The desire to translate events like Qaddafi’s death into video games is an attempt to simplify complex issues into patterns that we can recognize and make sense of, with predictable rules, defeatable “bad guys,” and the hopeful celebration of an “epic win.”

Russell is continually, even post-mortem, called “ provocative,” “ controversial,” and “ iconoclastic.” And at least a few of these obits have noted his conversion to Roman Catholicism all those years ago, though he was never quite settled in his faith. Certainly there was religious content in his films—the nuns and priests in a sexual standoff in The Devils (1971), Anthony Perkins’ creepy street preacher in Crimes of Passion (1984)—but it was the human experience that Russell so strangely charted that leaves me thinking of his “religious” nature. He portrayed the depths of human depravity and desire, of lust and liking.

Conversion, magic, flogging, the New Third World, Muslim philosophy, Malcolm. Compelling reading, in any year.

While a valiant effort at a compassionate depiction of individuals swept up in the horror of the Bosnian Genocide, Angelina Jolie’s main character, Danijel, simply ends up humanizing genocide.

In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, religious violence is supposed to be resisted, but it’s also violence that the audience is being asked to look at. Over and over and over again.