CURRENT MOVIES & OSCAR RATINGS

Nirvana

BABEL
Babel, called by some the best movie of the year can't hold a candle to Crash, from last year, which won Best Picture at the Oscars.

Went to see it today, but it just didn't do enough spinning a tale like Crash did, or as 21 Grams, also directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, who directed Babel.

However, the film is well-worth seeing, in that it shows some evils of the politicization of "terrorism" in stark detail and also the evils of some kind of apartheid regime growing in the US vis-à-vis the "Illegals" or non-ducumented workers issue.

Nice movie, but no Oscars here, I think. I'd give it a B+.

Nirvana

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the British Parliament banning the slave trade. To mark this event, a new movie, AMAZING GRACE, has just been released about the career of the noted English abolitionist, William Wilberforce. Has anyone seen this?

It's really quite interesting. Especially the parliamentary maneuver whereby the slave trade was effectively ended two years before the English Parliament officially outlawed the slave trade two hundred years ago this very year, in 1807!

Good movie.

William Wilberforce is on the Episcopal Church's Calendar of Saints for July 30. He was the champion of many worthy causes and an acquaintance of John Newton, a former slaveship captain. Newton had converted to the Christian religion and had become a clergyman. He wrote the much-loved hymn, "Amazing Grace."

In the movie, Albert Finney, who plays Newton, gives a stellar performance as an old man, now blinded with thick cataracts, telling of his soul's agony for the many souls who had perished under his watch on his transatlantic journeys. Really quite moving.

The issue of slavery itself is not quite so horrible as the brutish and hellish methods by which innocent souls were chained in rotten, cramped and diseased quarters under excruciating torture of weights and planks in order to supply the demand for them. The movie gives a sense of this horror.

Ultimately, it was the greed of the slave merchants, who obviously counted the life of a person from Africa of no value, that was to blame for these horrors. If any one of them had undertaken or supported any economic study of the sheer waste of what they were doing, they would have cleaned up their act —just for the sake of economy. But NO, they conveyed their business with a vengeance. They really believed that they were there to punish and enslave.

OR PERHAPS I have it all wrong above: The whole slave system DEPENDED on beaten down and broken men and women. It needed their very spirits to be manacled in order to "keep them in their places."

How truly horrible, whichever way!

I do think that the performance of Albert Finney is Oscar-worthy.

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I think that this movie shows just what a great SCANDAL slavery is in the history of the Christian church. That a people charged by the gospels to "pursue justice" (Matthew 23:23ƒƒ) should fall so short of protecting the "little ones" among them is truly a terrible stain (or sin!). The depravity of one man setting himself above another, giving the subservient one no personal space where he can be free for even a moment from some threat of retribution for some task undone or not done to complete satisfaction —all of this is surely unconscionable.

It is simply and clearly an unforgivable chapter in the history of the Christian church that slavery was officially sanctioned even by the Roman Catholic Church until 1888, when Pope Leo XIII declared in the papal encyclical In plurimis that enslavement of other human beings was morally wrong. Before that popes even owned slaves themselves. Indeed, many popes would pass bulls making the children of priests to be sold into slavery in order to keep the church solvent, by not having to break up properety among "heirs."

A terrifically informative web page to read more about this tragically long chapter of Christian travesties, sponsored by the Counterblast Foundation, can be found at:

http://www.heretication.info/_slavery.html

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