Facing the MPAA giant

The Motion Picture Association of America is crystal clear when it describes why its "PG" rating exists -- it's a warning flag.

"The theme of a PG-rated film may itself call for parental guidance," states the online explanation of the rating system. "There may be some profanity in these films. There may be some violence or brief nudity. ... The PG rating, suggesting parental guidance, is thus an alert for examination of a film by parents before deciding on its viewing by their children. Obviously such a line is difficult to draw."

Disagreements are a given. The Christian moviemakers behind a low-budget film called "Facing the Giants" were stunned when the MPAA pinned a PG rating on their gentle movie about a burned-out, depressed football coach whose life -- on and off the field -- takes a miraculous turn for the better.

"What the MPAA said is that the movie contained strong 'thematic elements' that might disturb some parents," said Kris Fuhr, vice president for marketing at Provident Films, which is owned by Sony BMG. Provident plans to open the film next fall in 380 theaters nationwide with the help of Samuel Goldwyn Films, which has worked with indie movies like "The Squid and the Whale."

Which "thematic elements" earned this squeaky-clean movie its PG?

"Facing the Giants" is too evangelistic.

The MPAA, noted Fuhr, tends to offer cryptic explanations for its ratings. In this case, she was told that it "decided that the movie was heavily laden with messages from one religion and that this might offend people from other religions. It's important that they used the word 'proselytizing' when they talked about giving this movie a PG. ...

"It is kind of interesting that faith has joined that list of deadly sins that the MPAA board wants to warn parents to worry about."

Overt Christian messages are woven throughout "Facing the Giants," which isn't surprising since the film was co-written and co-produced by brothers Alex and Stephen Kendrick, who are the "associate pastors of media" at Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Ga. In addition to working with the megachurch's cable-television channel, they created its Sherwood Pictures ministry -- collecting private donations to fund a $25,000 movie called "Flywheel," about a wayward Christian used-car salesman.

"Facing the Giants" cost $100,000 and resembles a fusion of the Book of Job and a homemade "Hoosiers," or perhaps a small-school "Friday Night Lights" blended with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association movies that used to appear in some mainstream theaters. Sherwood Pictures used local volunteers as actors and extras, backed by a small crew of tech professionals.

The movie includes waves of answered prayers, a medical miracle, a mysterious silver-haired mystic who delivers a message from God and a bench-warmer who kicks a 51-yard field goal to win the big game when his handicapped father pulls himself out of a wheelchair and stands under the goal post to inspire his son's faith. There's a prayer-driven gust of wind in there, too.

But the scene that caught the MPAA's attention may have been the chat between football coach Grant Taylor -- played by Alex Kendrick -- and a rich brat named Matt Prader. The coach says that he needs to stop bad-mouthing his bossy father and get right with God.

The boy replies: "You really believe in all that honoring God and following Jesus stuff? ... Well, I ain't trying to be disrespectful, but not everybody believes in that."

The coach says: "Matt, nobody's forcing anything on you. Following Jesus Christ is the decision that you're going to have to make for yourself. You may not want to accept it, because it'll change your life. You'll never be the same."

That kind of talk may be too blunt for some moviegoers, said Kendrick, but that's the way real people actually talk in Christian high schools in Georgia. Sherwood Baptist isn't going to apologize for making the kinds of movies that it wants to make.

"Look, I have those kinds of conversations about faith all the time and I've seen young people make decisions that change their lives," he said. "The reason we're making movies in the first place is that we hope they inspire people to think twice about their relationships with God.

"So we're going to tell the stories that we believe God wants us to tell. We have nothing to hide."

Connecting Baha'i dots in Iran

Anyone who reads the newspaper Kayhan knows that Baha'i believers are part of a giant conspiracy against Iran that has, at one time or another, included England, Russia, Israel and the CIA.

Baha'is also embrace alcohol, pork, gambling and adultery.

Human rights activists are studying this new wave of hate for one reason -- the Islamic Republic of Iran runs Kayhan. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei picks the managing editor. So there's more to these headlines than ink and paper.

"When Iran has a new enemy, it never takes long for them to connect that enemy to us," said Kit Bigelow, external affairs director for the Baha'i faith in the United States. "It used to be Russian and Britain, then it was Israel and the Zionists. Now, it's the United States. ... We can see certain dots being connected right now in Iran, even though we can't say for sure that we can see cause and effect. It's foreboding."

Here are some of the dots the experts are connecting.

Iranian officials recently arrested 54 Baha'is and their supporters involved in a UNICEF community service project in Shiraz, even though the young people obtained a permission letter for their project from the local Islamic Council. Last week, 51 of them were released on bail, although they have not been formally charged with a crime.

The three young people still in jail "were not the leaders, in any sense of the word" and no one knows why they have been singled out, said Bigelow. Other arrests during the past year have followed this pattern -- mysterious arrests, demands for bail and no formal charges. Meanwhile, Iranian police also raided six Baha'i homes and collected computers, books, notebooks and other documents.

"We think this is part of a strategy to keep the Baha'i community off balance, to keep us on tenterhooks," said Bigelow.

But nothing alarmed Baha'is more than the disclosure this spring of a confidential 2005 letter sent to the Iranian Ministry of Information, the Revolutionary Guard and police. It said the "Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, had instructed the Command headquarters to identify persons who adhere to the Baha'i faith and monitor their activities," according to a statement by Asma Jahangir of Pakistan, Special Rapporteur on religious liberty for the United Nations. The letter asked the "recipients to, in a highly confidential manner, collect any and all information about members of the Baha'i faith."

Anti-Defamation League director Abraham Foxman connected the dots and detected what he believes is a horrifying pattern.

"These actions ... are reminiscent of the steps taken against Jews in Europe and a dangerous step toward the institution of Nuremberg-type laws," said Foxman, a Holocaust survivor. "This clear attempt to step-up persecution of the Baha'i community in Iran sets a dangerous precedent" and has raised the historic persecution of Iran's largest religious minority "to the next level."

These strong words may provide little comfort, since Iranian leaders already claim the Baha'is are agents for Zionism.

Part of the problem is that the Baha'i faith, which proclaims the unity of all religions, also has unique ties to Islam and Iran. The faith began with a leader known as the Bab, who claimed a direct lineage from Muhammad. He predicted the coming of a new prophet, but was executed in 1850 in Tabriz.

Baha'is believe this new prophet -- the successor to Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad and others -- was Baha'ullah, who was born in 1817 in Tehran. He was persecuted and repeatedly banished to Baghdad, Constantinople and, finally, Palestine. He died in 1892 and his tomb, and the Bab's tomb, is in a shrine near the Baha'i headquarters in Haifa.

Thus, Iran insists that Baha'i believers are both apostates and heretics, Thus, the faith is a sect that does not deserve the recognition and rights that the Islamic republic grants to Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians.

"They believe that the Baha'i faith is not a valid, independent world religion in its own right," said Bigelow, who is a convert from Christianity. "And, of course, our holy shrine is located in what has become the modern state of Israel. So when Baha'is around the world, including thousands of Baha'is in Iran, send money to help support this shrine and our work they are sending money to Israel. You can imagine what the current leaders of Iran think of that."

That Da Vinci sex code

In the beginning, Judaism was a faith built on sacred sex.

At least, that's what Dan Brown told 60 million readers in "The Da Vinci Code," speaking though a fictional Harvard University scholar named Robert Langdon. And while the characters are fiction, the novelist continues to affirm the statement that opens his book: "All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate."

One of those "secret rituals" is an eye-opener.

"Langdon's Jewish students always looked flabbergasted when he told them that the early Jewish tradition involved ritualistic sex. In the Temple, no less," wrote Brown, in one of many long speeches that explain his iconoclastic plot. "Early Jews believed that the Holy of Holies in Solomon's Temple housed not only God but also His powerful female equal, Shekinah. Men seeking spiritual wholeness came to the Temple to visit priestesses ... with whom they made love and experienced the divine through physical union."

For most people, the big news in "The Da Vinci Code" story was its message that Jesus was a brilliant and charismatic man -- but not the Son of God -- who was married to St. Mary Magdalene, had a child and tried to start a church built on secret truths and goddess worship. But Jesus was killed and, after a few centuries, powerful men crushed the Gnostic Christians. Meanwhile, the secret bloodline of Jesus lived on in Europe.

That's the side of the book, and now the movie, that makes headlines. But there is a message in the novel that is even more controversial and, for traditional Christians and Jews, more radical, according to philosopher Vishal Mangalwadi, who was born and educated in the diverse religious culture of India.

"The Da Vinci Code" is absolutely right when it states that the Judeo-Christian tradition, through the ages, did everything that it could to suppress sexual mysticism, fertility rites and goddess worship. The early church, he stressed, emerged in a world that was packed with pagan sanctuaries filled with scores of temple prostitutes.

The Judeo-Christian tradition emphasized the holiness of marriage, but never taught that sexual intercourse was -- in and of itself -- a sacred rite in which the spirit escapes the body and is able commune with some all-embracing deity.

"Dan Brown is right about the following: some pagan converts to Christ did bring sexual mysticism into the early church," said Mangalwadi, in a speech he delivered this week at Hollywood (Calif.) Presbyterian Church. In fact, the Book of Revelation condemns two early churches that tolerated believers who "practiced religious sex. It is possible that before becoming Christians these women and men had participated in prostitution in pagan temples. ...

"Given the fact that Christianity was an ascending religious force, they may have found it to their advantage to attract customers in the name of Christ. Some may well have re-written the life of Christ in the light of pagan spirituality to justify their preferred 'religious' practice."

In "The Da Vinci Code" itself, Brown stresses that the use of sexual rituals to create union with the gods and goddesses is older than the Christian faith and could, he claimed, be seen in Judaism. A one point, a central character witnesses a modern ritual in which a couple has sexual intercourse while surrounded by a circle of other members of the secret society that is preserving the true Christianity.

Thus, Brown's alter ego explains: "Historically, intercourse was the act through which male and female experienced God. The ancients believed that the male was spiritually incomplete until he had carnal knowledge of the sacred feminine. Physical union with the female remained the sole means through which man could become spiritually complete and ultimately achieve gnosis -- knowledge of the divine. ... 'By communing with woman,' Langdon said, 'man could achieve a climactic instance when his mind went totally blank and he could see God.' "

The key is that this experience is the "sole means" for transformation. This theme is explicit in the novel, even though the movie does not stress it.

"Dan Brown is promoting a mystic experience in which our mind goes 'totally blank' -- beyond words, thoughts, ideals, beliefs and values," argued Mangalwadi. "This is a non-rational experience. Mystics promote it because the consider the intellect to be the source of ignorance, not a means to gaining knowledge."

Rosenthal refused to remain silent

During his decades as a New York Times correspondent, the late A.M. Rosenthal saw lots of dead bodies in Pakistan, Nepal, Afghanistan, Kashmir, India and other troubled lands.

One day in Calcutta he started asking questions: What if some of these people are dying, but not yet dead? Was he supposed to help them? These questions stayed with him when he returned home to become an editor.

"I devoted a great deal of my time and thinking to wondering: When is it a sin to walk past a dying person? What number does God have? Is it one? Is it two?", asked Rosenthal, in a BreakPoint radio interview after receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002.

What if we know that torture is taking place, but cannot see the evidence with our own eyes or hear it with our own ears? Does God forgive those who don't act? "Is that what God is saying: 'If you can't see them, it's OK to walk away from them?' Or is he saying, 'If you can't hear them?' Suppose you can hear them, but not see them, or they're around the corner. When is apathy a sin?"

Rosenthal kept these questions to himself as his career soared. As a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter he covered the world and, as editor, he caused a journalistic earthquake when he pushed for the publication of the Pentagon Papers. For 56 years Abe Rosenthal helped change the New York Times and, thus, helped shape his times.

After leaving the editor's desk in 1986, he began writing his “On My Mind” op-ed columns in which he championed the human-rights causes that dominated his life -- free speech and freedom of conscience. Rosenthal was a secular Jew and an old-fashioned liberal from the Bronx, but many of his old questions about liberty, sin and apathy began to break into the open and affect his work.

"Abe fought to cure our blind spots and it worked," said Pulitzer Prize-winner Nicholas Kristof, speaking at Rosenthal's May 14 funeral at Manhattan's Central Synagogue. "He did indeed teach us to see."

The healing process wasn't painless, especially when Rosenthal latched onto one particular religious issue. Some human-rights activists are convinced that one of the reasons he lost his column and was forced to leave the Times was because he wouldn't stop writing about the persecution of religious minorities around the world.

Rosenthal couldn't understand why so many journalists just didn't "get" that story. I talked to him several times about this issue, in part because Jewish conservative Michael Horowitz sent him a copy of a 1996 column that I wrote about the slaughter of Christians and animists in South Sudan and the rebirth of the slave trade.

Rosenthal said he asked some newsroom colleagues this wasn?t a big news story. No one had a good answer. He ended up writing -- in one year alone -- 20 columns about the persecution of Christians, Buddhists, moderate Muslims and other religious minorities in human-rights hot spots around the world.

"You don't need to be a rabbi or a minister to get this story. You just need to be a journalist. You just have to be able to look at the numbers of people involved and then look at all the other stories that were linked to it," he told me, at the end of that year. "Why are journalists missing this? ... I am inclined to believe that they just can't grasp the concept of a movement that includes conservatives, middle-of-the-road people and even some liberals. Their distrust of religious people -- especially conservatives -- is simply too strong for them to see what is happening."

With his columns, Rosenthal helped pave the way for the passage of the Freedom From Religious Persecution Act of 1997 and the creation of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Now, that hard-to-label coalition that fought for justice in South Sudan is, with a jolt of Hollywood star power, rallying support for the peace process in Darfur, where Islamists are attacking other Muslims.

Rosenthal refused to keep quiet. After his death, a Time editorial underlined the importance of a key Rosenthal statement about the Pentagon Papers: "When something important is going on, silence is a lie."

That's a great quote, one that perfectly explains why Rosenthal was so driven to write about religious persecution.

When believers are dying, silence is a lie.

So who is Dan Brown?

There was no way to film "The Lord of the Rings" without dealing with the author and producer Peter Jackson knew it.

Who was J.R.R. Tolkien? Luckily, the Oxford don left behind letters and essays about his Catholic faith and its impact on his heart, mind and soul.

"What we tried to do was honor the things that were important to Tolkien," said Jackson, after screening "The Two Towers" for the press. "We didn't want to make it a religious film. But he was very religious and some of the messages and some of the themes are based on his beliefs."

When artists turn a novel into a movie, they need to understand the author and it helps if he has, in the past, been candid about his beliefs and values. It helps to know something about the worldview that shaped the fiction.

So who is novelist Dan Brown? How will his beliefs affect "The Da Vinci Code" movie that will roll -- tsunami style -- into thousands of theaters next weekend?

It's hard to answer these questions, because Brown rarely agrees to serious interviews. Entertainment Weekly recently resorted to running a feature entitled "10 Things We Learned About Dan Brown From His Recent Trial."

Who is Dan Brown? He grew up in the Episcopal Church and was a regular at church camps. His mother was a church musician. His father taught mathematics at Phillips Exeter Academy, so Brown lived and studied there before going to Amherst College. During his college years, as often happens, Brown veered away from faith.

We know that he tried teaching English, failed as a songwriter and, early on, struggled as a writer. His wife, Blythe, is a painter who has played a major role in his work with her research skills and anger at traditional Catholicism. We know that Brown says he outlined "The Da Vinci Code" before he -- or his wife -- read the conspiracy theory classic "Holy Blood, Holy Grail." We know that Brown beat claims of plagiarism in that recent trial in London.

Interviewing himself at DanBrown.com, he argues that his book is a godsend for those open to debating religious questions and a challenge to anyone clinging to ancient doctrines. In other words, anyone who thinks his book is an attack on his or her faith is probably the kind of person whose faith deserves to be attacked.

"This book is not anti-anything. It's a novel," said Brown. "I wrote this story in an effort to explore certain aspects of Christian history that interest me. The vast majority of devout Christians understand this fact and consider 'The Da Vinci Code' an entertaining story that promotes spiritual discussion and debate. Even so, a small but vocal group of individuals has proclaimed the story dangerous, heretical and anti-Christian."

The problem is the novel's opening statement: "All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate." After that, Brown proceeds to argue that Jesus was a charismatic man who married, had a child and created a goddess-friendly faith. The early church, however, twisted his teachings. Thus, as a brilliant skeptic says in the novel, "almost everything our fathers taught us about Christ is false."

Still, it's crucial to note that Brown is not opposed to Christianity, per se. In the online interview he stresses that he considers himself a Christian, but one who is seeking his own path of enlightenment. Brown sees himself as someone who is searching for a crossroads where science, sacred sex and all the world religions meet and work out their differences in the embrace of an all-embracing goddess, god or pantheon of gods to be negotiated at some point in the future.

"If you ask three people what it means to be Christian, you will get three different answers," he said. "Some feel being baptized is sufficient. Others feel you must accept the Bible as absolute historical fact. Still others require a belief that all those who do not accept Christ as their personal savior are doomed to hell. Faith is a continuum, and we each fall on that line where we may."

Who is Dan Brown? He is an evangelist proclaiming the message that there is no orthodoxy other than his liberating orthodoxy that says traditional Christianity is heresy. His goal is to liberate Jesus from all those picky ancient creeds.

Catholic choirs, alive or dead?

Lucy E. Carroll has never actually attended a Catholic Mass in which a cantor belted out, "He'll be coming 'round the altar when he comes! He'll be coming 'round the altar when he comes!" At least, that hasn't happened yet.

"I know that some people have used Stephen Foster music in a Mass," said the musical director at the Carmelite monastery in Philadelphia. "I've heard about people using the melody from the waltz scene in 'Beauty and the Beast' for the 'Gloria.' And I've heard more than one report about people singing the 'Agnus Dei,' which means 'Lamb of God,' to that old song 'Send in the Clowns.' "

In many parishes, she said, pop songs and the modern hymnody inspired by them have all but replaced traditional hymns and, heaven forbid, ancient chants and actual Catholic anthems.

This is old news. What many outsiders may not realize is that many Catholic parishes have, in the past decade or two, followed the lead of Protestant megachurches and now feature plugged-in "praise bands" and worship-team singers -- complete with solo microphones -- who sway in the Sunday-morning spotlights.

Legions of Catholics like this music, admitted Carroll. But many do not, including some younger Catholics who are drawn to candles, incense, sacred art and the mysterious melodies of ancient chants. In many parishes, she said, it may be time -- as shocking as this may sound -- to start a choir.

Carroll is an unrepentant choir director. She believes there is more to being a Catholic musician than the ability to play some guitar chords while singing, "Here I am Lord, Is it I Lord? I have heard You calling in the night." She can speak words like "Victoria" and "Palestrina" without flinching.

"Most people who lead music in our churches today are not trained to be liturgical musicians," said Carroll, an adjunct professor at the Westminster Choir College at Princeton University. "They do not understand that there is music that is sacred in nature and then there is music that is secular in nature. There is Christian music that would be totally acceptable at a revival service or a youth rally, but it is not ... acceptable in a Catholic Mass."

What should someone do if they want to start a choir? Carroll recently published a list of tips in the conservative Adoremus Bulletin (www.adoremus.org) that included:

* Obtain the full support of the priest, including a pledge that he will praise the choir from the pulpit and cooperate with its efforts.

* Find a choir director and an accompanist. It helps to have money to hire someone and the person must understand worship as well as musical notes on a page. Carroll suggests that parish leaders search at local high schools and colleges, perhaps even seeking out talented students seeking practical experience.

* The best way to find singers is by personal contact. Do not, she emphasized, advertise with phrases such as "Do you like to sing in the shower?" The goal is to find choir singers, not soloists whose volume control is cranked up to "water buffalo." Avoid people who say, "I'll be there for Mass, but not rehearsals."

* Start slow, perhaps singing at the same Mass once a month. Resist the temptation to hide your fledgling choir under a wave of instrumental sound. Train the singers to handle some traditional, a cappella (voices alone) music.

* Start with unison music then let the choir sing "antiphonally," with women singing one line and men the next. Then attempt canons and rounds, such as the anonymous "Dona Nobis Pacem" that congregations have enjoyed for generations. Eventually, the director will learn who can sing soprano, alto, tenor and bass. At that point, the choir can try two-part chants and then easy anthems from a traditional Catholic hymnbook or by modern composers who write sacred music for use in Mass.

The goal is for the choir to become a close-knit family of musicians who lead the church family in worship, said Carroll. She is convinced that soloists with microphones inevitably turn into performers.

"We have to get away from the rock bands and the folks groups and the polka players and everybody else," she said. "We need to stop entertaining our people and get back to our own worship tradition -- which is leading our people in the worship of God."

Rushdie says, 'Get religion'

It remains Salman Rushdie's fervent conviction that it's wrong for clergy, jurists or politicos to threaten writers' lives simply because they think their books are terrible.

Not even the shocking success of "The Da Vinci Code" has weakened his pro-novelist stance, he said, drawing laughter at Calvin College's recent Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids, Mich.

This faith in free speech isn't surprising since the apostate Muslim has lived in hiding ever since his 1988 novel "The Satanic Verses" inspired Iran's top ayatollah to issue a fatwa calling for his death. No one knows better than Rushdie -- who calls himself a "dreadful old atheist" -- that faith, ink and blood can be stirred into a deadly brew.

Nevertheless, he also believes that writers who refuse to wrestle with the power of faith and the supernatural are refusing to deal with real people in the real world. Consider, he said, the daily lives of the gods and believers in his homeland -- India.

"The people in India do not think of the gods as abstractions," said Rushdie. "They think of them as real beings who move amongst them and work upon their lives every day. If you have something that you need, if somebody is sick, if a child needs to get into college or whatever it may be, you would go and find the relevant deity to make the offering to and you would believe that that would increase your chances of getting what you needed in life."

Rushdie, 58, understands India -- with its tense mix of Hinduism, Islam and Christianity -- from the inside out. As a child, he enjoyed asking his Muslim grandfather why he practiced a faith in which the prayer regime required him to spend so much time with his rear end higher than his head. Meanwhile, Rushdie's father was both an unbeliever and a Muslim historian.

After years of airing his doubts, the pre-teen iconoclast celebrated his own loss of faith with a symbolic culinary sin -- a ham sandwich. The fact that God did not strike him dead with a thunderbolt confirmed his newborn atheism.

As a writer, Rushdie said that he has always insisted on treating religion as a "normal part of life." Thus, his goal was "not to give it special treatment, not to hedge it around with the language of taboo and respect because that has always seemed, to me, to be anti-intellectual."

However, skeptics have their own way of avoiding the truth when dealing with intensely religious cultures, he said. Even writers who are unbelievers must realize that almost everyone in a land like India believes in one god or another and views life through the lens of that faith. Skeptical writers who refuse to accept this reality are practicing another form of intellectually dishonesty.

Rushdie does not, of course, believe writers should surrender their right to deal with religion in an irreverent or critical manner. However, he stressed that skeptics must be willing to doubt their own doubts and remain open to the possibility that the believers may, in some mysterious way, be right.

After all, he said, the real world is not completely realistic. Ordinary people believe in miracles and their beliefs are considered normal. Even in modern America, real life contains moments that are utterly surreal.

"So the sense that the miraculous and the mundane, that the supernatural and the everyday, coexist in a completely natural way, is everywhere," he said. "The idea that, somehow, these are separate categories of thing is quite alien. So if you are going to write about that world, you have to take cognizance of that fact. You have to recognize that this is how people think."

Ultimately, religious faith is one of the most powerful forces shaping the myths and stories that bind together families, nations and cultures, said Rushdie. In a free society, people are free to tell and interpret their own stories. Tyranny is when other people have the right to censure or kill the storytellers who get out of line.

"We are, as human beings, storytelling animals," he insisted. "We are the only creature on the earth that tells itself stories in order to understand what it is and what its life means. Therefore the story is of unusual importance to us, whether we are writers or not. It is something unusually important to human nature."

Sacred meals, Baptist and Orthodox

It's hard to hold a proper Southern Baptist dinner on the grounds without someone bringing a lemon pound cake.

The recipe John David Finley grew up with was as down to earth as cooking can get, with one cup of butter, four eggs, the grated peel of half a lemon and the right amounts of flour, sugar, baking powder, vanilla, salt and nutmeg.

But somewhere between the lines is the joy of his paternal grandmother, Lula Mae Finley. And those black-eyed peas -- you'll need a ham bone -- are just black-eyed peas, unless you have the chopped bell pepper and jalapenos in there. Then you're talking about New Year's dinner with Owen Jefferson "Popo" Finley, Sr. That homemade vanilla ice cream? That's part of the legacy of the Rev. Owen Jefferson Finley, Jr., who survived the hell of Omaha Beach on D-Day before spending 38 years as pastor of the Trinity Baptist Church in McAlester, Okla. The list goes on and on.

People used to teach old recipes to their children back in the days before interstate highways, fast-food empires and televisions ate the family dinner hour, said Father John David Finley, author of "Sacred Meals: From Our Family Table." It's a book about cooking, of course, but it's also a memoir about the ties that bind his past as a Southern Baptist preacher's kid to his adult life as an Eastern Orthodox priest, composer and evangelist in Southern California.

"One of the most important things I've learned in life is that food isn't just food," he said. "At some point, I realized that I was preparing and serving certain foods at certain times of the year not just to honor or remember my grandparents and my parents, but to enter into a kind of communion with them. ...

"Suddenly I saw the Communion of the Saints in a whole different way. I realized why food has been so important to the church's theology since the very beginning."

At the deepest level, there is the bread and wine consecrated in the altar rites of the Divine Liturgy. But the ordinary foods of life play key roles in the Eastern fasting traditions of Great Lent, the six-week season in which observant Orthodox believers strive not to eat meat and dairy products. The fasting traditions of Great Lent lead to Holy Week and the great feast of Pascha, or Easter. The Orthodox feast this year is on April 23, using the ancient Julian calendar.

Father Finley said the goal, through the church's feasts and fasts, is for families to realize that the meals they share together are also sacred. Thus, the altar table and the family table are linked. Both are "manifestations of the ways that God feeds us throughout our lives," he said.

It's hard to grasp this in an age in which food is surrounded by golden arches and plastic toys more often than golden vestments, incense and icons.

"There's no room for fellowship in a McDonald's culture," he said. "Every now and then people realize this. They feel isolated and rushed and cheated. They know something is wrong."

"Sacred Meals" features commentary on this subject from an Eastern Orthodox pioneer in North America, the late theologian Father Alexander Schmemann.

"Centuries of secularism have failed to transform eating into something strictly utilitarian," he wrote. "A meal is still a rite -- the last 'natural sacrament' of family and friendship, of life that is more than 'eating' and 'drinking.' To eat is still something more than to maintain bodily functions. People may not understand what that 'something more' is, but they nevertheless desire to celebrate it."

This is precisely what Finley and his family will celebrate Sunday when the midnight rites of Holy Pascha give way to a communal feast -- rich in meats, cheeses, eggs and non-Lenten treats -- that will last into the hours just before dawn.

"Our basket will have to include ham, because I can't imagine a Finley feast without ham," said the priest. "Then there is that great Pascha cheese that the Russians make. It's almost like cheesecake that you spread with a knife. They eat it with that wonderful bread called 'Kulich.'

"I have to make that for the children. You know a food has become a family tradition when the children yell at you if you don't make it."

Year 17 -- Reporters, crow's ears, Karma Light nuns

The Vatican is known its complex rituals, rich in ancient symbols and mysterious details. Take, for example, the funeral of Pope John Paul II, as described by the International Herald Tribune.

"The 84-year-old John Paul was laid out in Clementine Hall, dressed in white and red vestments, his head covered with a white bishop's miter and propped up on three dark gold pillows," wrote Ian Fisher of the New York Times. "Tucked under his left arm was the silver staff, called the crow's ear, that he had carried in public."

Get the joke?

You see, that ornate silver shepherd's crook is actually called a crosier (or "crozier"), not a "crow's ear."

This is the kind of error that believers love to cite as evidence that too many journalists don't know which way is up when it comes to religion. Believe me, I receive more than my share of emails offering other examples. Did a BBC producer really write a subtitle saying that "Karma Light" nuns had gathered to mourn the pope?

Part of the problem is that religious people often speak in unknown tongues and it's hard for journalists to tell what they're saying. Thus, mistakes happen. It's a bad thing to mess up the words when many of the words are sacred.

Sometimes, it helps to laugh.

Once a year, I mark this column's anniversary -- this is No. 18 -- by collecting some of the strange words and events from the previous 12 months that just didn't fit anywhere in particular. Obviously, I know that journalists make mistakes on the "God beat." But, believe me, the folks in the pulpits and pews can get pretty strange, too.

* Pope John Paul II made headlines in 1986 when he visited a synagogue. Thus, a BBC writer said that the new Pope Benedict XVI's "visit to the Cologne synagogue ? will mark only the second time in history that a head of the Catholic Church has entered a Jewish place of worship." A reader sent me that item with this postscript: "Not counting the apostle Peter, obviously."

* I thought this was a hoax. But it does appear that South Bronx Episcopalians have created a hip-hop Book of Common Prayer. Thus saith Bishop Catherine Roskam: "If Jesus were alive today, he would have been a rapper."

I also love that the Episcopal Network for Animal Welfare is selling its own barbecue apron. Grill on.

* Anyone seeking information on the year's hottest musical trend should visit www.hasidicreggae.com. Yes, you read that right.

* Back to Pope Benedict XVI. It seems that someone at the Associated Press needs to bone up on church history. A story from Vatican City on Nov. 27 began this way: "Pope Benedict XVI ushered in the Christmas season Sunday, calling it a time for joy when Christians should find it within themselves to hope that they can change the world." Actually, the pope was marking the start of Advent, the penitential season that precedes Christmas. The 12-day Christmas season begins on Dec. 25.

* Speaking of the Christmas wars, a journalist sent me this rather understated headline from Miami Beach: "Blindfolded Santa Hanging From Noose At Home Upsets Neighborhood." I can understand that. What I cannot understand is why some schools allow students to sing "Feliz Navidad (happy Christmas)," but not "White Christmas" and other songs that contain the C-word.

* You knew this was coming. The truly devoted can now buy an "iBelieve" device that clicks on to the top of an Apple iPod Shuffle and turns it -- yes -- into a large white cross that can be worn around the neck.

I believe that has a bit more class than those gym shorts with the words "Left Behind" printed, well, you can imagine where.

* The publication of 12 caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad upset many readers. However, other readers were just as upset when newspapers declined to publish them, with editors saying -- to a chorus of snickers in many pews -- that they did not want to offend religious believers.

Thus, one Bob Flavell wrote to the Boston Globe and said: "I find all of your editorial cartoons deeply offensive, morally, religiously, philosophically and spiritually. In fact, I don't like your editorials, either. And the editorializing in your news coverage is annoying as well. In keeping with your cowardly policy not to offend anyone, kindly cease publication at once."