Elijah on SNL and Some Real Content

[dirae.livejournal.com]

( SNL Skits )

---

From: Faith & Values: Box Office Theology
She distinguishes in her mind from the Bible and popular culture, such as "The Lord of the Rings" or "Star Wars": Those are fiction, and the Bible is true, she said.

However, she has gotten some good lessons from the "Rings" movies, she said. "It made me realize that you can deal with your problems. There's always hope."

For the Rev. Chris Seay, a Houston church developer, Katy's opinion is a beacon of hope. "The church often sanitizes stories," he said, and doesn't make them "real" enough.

"Many preachers do sermons on David, the great hero. Yet they don't say he was also a murderer, adulterer and thief."

He thinks that it makes for more effective evangelizing when churches admit that many lives are more like the broken characters in the Bible. "Our lives are a little more like Jerry Springer episodes than we'd like to admit," Seay said, which is why he likes using entertainment references in his ministry.

Ralph Wood, professor of theology and literature at Baylor University in Texas, said, "Churches underwhelm their people massively." He just wrote "The Gospel According to Tolkien," the latest in the popular Westminster John Knox Press series of Christian teachings in popular media.

"Tolkien gives them what the churches do not," Wood said. "There are some clear exceptions to that rule, of course, but Tolkien takes you out of yourself. You enter a realm that's cosmically large, and that enables you to see what draws you away from your own self interest. That's precisely the definition of what it means to be a church."

At Faith Inkubators, for Dolmar, Tolkien's works aren't "scripture" in a pure sense, but he does see life lessons in the works.

In an e-mail interview he wrote, "The whole story hinges on faith, trust and mercy. Each person has a part to play. Aragorn, trusting beyond hope that Frodo will see his part of the quest through, leads his entire nation into a battle that they can not hope to win in order to distract Sauron. Sam must retain his faith in Frodo and the power of their friendship as he is confronted by the daunting task of seeing Frodo through Mordor. And of course, in the end it is the mercy that Frodo showed to Gollum that carries the day for the heroes. Great themes. And that's without even touching the environmentalism, the respect for the simplicity, and the corrupting nature of power."