Terry Mattingly

September 28, 2026

young people, popular culture, movies, mass media, LGBTQ, doctrine, books, Anglicanism

C.S. Lewis readers brace for big-screen arrival of 'Ziggy Aslan' in Narnia flick

Terry Mattingly

September 28, 2026

young people, popular culture, movies, mass media, LGBTQ, doctrine, books, Anglicanism

C.S. Lewis readers brace for big-screen arrival of 'Ziggy Aslan' in Narnia flick

During a fistfight, young David Bowie suffered an injury to his left eye, leaving its pupil permanently wide open, with one blue eye looking radically different than the other.

Bowie didn't have heterochromia -- different-colored eyes. But his mysterious gaze was a key trait of Ziggy Stardust, his genderbending, rainbow-hued stage persona mixing glitter, bright lipstick, platform shoes and various female fashion trends.

This early 1970s bolt of glam-rock lightning was part of the cultural storm that shaped Greta Gerwig's imagination, leading to her "rock opera" vision of "The Chronicles of Narnia," the classic C.S. Lewis novels for children.

"David Bowie saved my life," Gerwig told Empire Magazine, while discussing "Narnia: The Magician's Nephew," poised for release in early 2027.

"Paul McCartney saved my life. David Gilmour saved my life. Pete Townshend saved my life. … When I heard their music, I had this deep sense of [thinking], 'You're gonna be okay.'" She added: "Narnia is literally a world made out of music. It is a world sung to life by Aslan."

In Narnia, Aslan is the Christ figure, repeatedly described by Lewis -- an Oxford don and Christian apologist -- as the "King of the wood and the son of the great Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea. … The Lion, the great Lion." In "The Magician's Nephew," Narnia's creation story, Aslan is first described as "a Lion. Huge, shaggy and bright," with a basso profundo voice "deep enough to be the voice of the earth."

Gerwig ignited an online firestorm by choosing the legendary actress Meryl Streep to provide Aslan's voice. And the director moved "The Magician's Nephew" from the early-1900s to the 1950s, so that its young hero Digory Kirke would grow up in the world that produced Bowie and other rock visionaries. Thus, the Narnia timeline created by Lewis will, in its climactic books, move from World War II Britain to the cultural and sexual revolutions of the 1960s and '70s.

Also, the Empire cover offers the first portrait of the character some call "Ziggy Aslan."

Terry Mattingly

August 7, 2023

worship, Women, young people, sex, popular culture, movies, mass media, Marriage, family life, doctrine

2023: A 'Barbie' Odyssey does raise (wink, wink) moral, cultural and theological issues

Terry Mattingly

August 7, 2023

worship, Women, young people, sex, popular culture, movies, mass media, Marriage, family life, doctrine

2023: A 'Barbie' Odyssey does raise (wink, wink) moral, cultural and theological issues

Hollywood worships big movie franchises, so fans can expect "Barbie" sequels.

One plot proposal quickly emerged from an unlikely source -- Sister Mary Joseph Calore of the Society Devoted to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in St. Cresson, Pennsylvania.

"'Barbie becomes a nun' would be a great sequel," she wrote, on the X platform. Her post contained this pitch to Warner Bros. executives: "Dissatisfied by endless parties and user friends, an eating disorder, spending addictions with clothes and shoes, and cohabitating with the shallow & unemployed playboy Ken, Barbie's sportscar has been parked more and more at an adoration chapel. She is seriously giving thought to draining the pool, putting her condo on the market, cutting her hair and donning the religious habit."

That would be a twist, after a cinematic manifesto arguing that life as a real woman is painful and complicated, but it's better than being an iconic plastic doll.

"This movie should have been silly and fun, but it ended up being preachy and earnest," said Barbara Nicolosi Harrington, a former Catholic nun who became a screenwriter and Hollywood script doctor. "I mean, how far can you go with a story about Barbie?"

Writer-director Greta Gerwig's previous work has been impressive, stressed Harrington, who teaches at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia. With "Little Women," Gerwig showed the ability to offer a fresh take on a familiar story. Now, "Barbie" will draw intense scrutiny, since she will direct at least one movie in the upcoming Netflix take on "The Chronicles of Narnia" novels by the Christian apologist C.S. Lewis.

"Barbie" contains ambitious attempts to mix serious, even if tongue in cheek, social commentary with pop-culture mythology -- such as a shot-for-shot homage to Stanley Kubrick's legendary dawn-of-consciousness scene in "2001: A Space Odyssey."

The big "Barbie" question, noted Other Feminisms writer Leah Libresco Sargeant, is stated in a soundtrack ballad -- "What Was I Made For?"

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What Do the Orthodox Converts Want? (2006)

It doesn't take a Ph.D. in Liturgical Studies to tell the difference between a Southern Baptist church and an Orthodox church. You can get some pretty good clues just by walking in the door and looking around. But there are some similarities between the two that might be a little trickier to spot. For instance, let me tell you about what life is like on Sunday nights in a Southern Baptist congregation.

Baptists worship at several different times during the week -- at least they did in the old days when I was growing up as a Southern Baptist pastor's son. One of those times is on Sunday nights. Back in the early 1980s, I was active in a church in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in which the typical Sunday morning crowd would be about 200 to 300 people, which is rather small for a Baptist church, but fairly normal for an Orthodox parish. Then the crowd on Sunday night would be from 40 to 45 people.

Now, that ratio should sound familiar to many priests who lead Vespers services. But the similarities don’t stop there.

Before the age of 30, I became a deacon and the finance chairman of that church -- which, in the Southern Baptist way of doing things, meant that I was the only person, not excluding the pastor, who saw the annual pledge cards. I was the only person in the congregation who knew who was giving what.

If there is an experience in life that will teach you the meaning of original sin, finance chairman is that role. What I discovered through that experience is that there is no connection whatsoever between how much a family gives to the church and how much money that family makes. Instead, I found that the key connection is faithfulness in worship. If you attend the Sunday night service at a typical Baptist church and look around at the 40 people there in comparison to the 200 or 300 in attendance on Sunday morning, you will find that about 80 percent of the church's giving is accounted for in that group.

The bottom line: The Sunday night experience in a Baptist church is very similar to that in Saturday evening Vespers services in an Orthodox church. As Bishop Antoun told me once, if you look at who attends Great Vespers and comes to confession, you are looking at about 80 percent of the service, the giving, and the energy in most parishes.

Who comes to Vespers? Who comes to confession? Who comes to the feasts, and why do they come? That’s where I would like to start as we consider this question: What do the converts want?

What we’re doing @ GetReligion.org

Originally posted on getreligion.org

Day after day, millions of Americans who frequent pews see ghosts when they pick up their newspapers or turn on television news.

They read stories that are important to their lives, yet they seem to catch fleeting glimpses of other characters or other plots between the lines. There seem to be other ideas or influences hiding there.

One minute they are there. The next they are gone. There are ghosts in there, hiding in the ink and the pixels. Something is missing in the basic facts or perhaps most of the key facts are there, yet some are twisted. Perhaps there are sins of omission, rather than commission.

A lot of these ghosts are, well, holy ghosts. They are facts and stories and faces linked to the power of religious faith. Now you see them. Now you don't. In fact, a whole lot of the time you don't get to see them. But that doesn't mean they aren't there.

I want to show you an an example -- a case study, if you will -- of what I am talking about, a ghost in a set of stories that is related to this blog that you are visiting (and we hope you come back often).

Democracy of the Dead - Snow Traditions

inter is over and it's time to pack away the shovels, down jackets, insulated boots and mittens until next year. The changing seasons teach different lessons and, this winter, I was reminded of a great truth about life. It goes something like this: There is a right way and a wrong way to shovel snow.

Perhaps you saw the headlines about the massive storms that hit the nation's capital, this past winter. Right after everyone calmed down from the Y2K scare, we were reminded that there are other ways to bring an entire region to a screeching halt.

Or, perhaps you had to dig your way out of record-breaking drifts in some other corner of the country, this year. Or perhaps you live someplace where it's normal to see several feet of snow. Perhaps you're a pro.

I grew up on the Texas Gulf Coast, which is hardly a great place to learn how to handle snow. We were masters of mosquito control.

But, after college, I found myself in the frozen Midwest, where shoveling snow is an art -- right up there with boiling corn and planning tailgate parties. The snow started about Thanksgiving and, before long, I realized that it wasn't going away on its own.

Several weeks, and several backaches later, I started watching the local talent. This is when it hit me: I was not the first person in the history of the world to shovel snow. I didn't have to reinvent the wheel. There I was, a youngster, slumping to the side of the path in exhaustion while gray- haired neighbors soldiered on.

What did they know that I didn't know? Well, yes, there were different kinds of shovels and different kinds of techniques and some folks were more doctrinaire than others. But there were common themes, such as bending your knees, not getting the shovel TOO full and never flinging the snow into the wind. There was a right way and wrong way to face this challenge and, I decided, only a fool would go it alone.

Eventually, I humbled myself and started asking questions. The elders took me in, showed me the ropes and handed down what they had learned -- a kind of oral snow-shoveling Tradition.

Rediscovering Religion — Religion Coverage: Past as Prologue? (2003)

Religion Coverage: Past as Prologue?
(Copyright) The Poynter Institute Poynter Reports, May 2003

Lou Grant had a problem.

Actually, the city editor of the classic TV comedy had two problems.

First of all, the fictional Los Angeles Tribune had lost its religion editor and no self-respecting journalist wanted the job. Second, Grant needed to ditch a lazy, often-drunk, no-good reporter named Mal Cavanaugh.

Finally, Grant saw the light. He told Cavanaugh he was the new religion editor.

"That stinks! Before you stick me with a lousy job like that, I'd quit," said the reporter, before storming out of the room.

Grant's staff beamed. The religion beat was still vacant, but who cared?

That scenario rang true to the editors and religion reporters I interviewed while doing my graduate work at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, researching a project that reached the cover of The Quill in January, 1983.

Many religion-beat veterans were proud of their work, but felt like Rodney Dangerfield in their newsrooms. Editors kept saying that they knew religion was news, but that religion-beat stories seemed too boring, or too controversial, to warrant dedicated coverage.

That's the ticket -- too boring and too controversial.

Journalism strategies in a hostile marketplace (2001)

Soon after John Grisham finished law school in 1981, he started hanging out at the DeSoto County Courthouse on the town square in Hernando, Miss. He had tried writing a book or two at the University of Mississippi, but nothing came of it. Then one day he overheard the horrifying courtroom testimony of a 12-year-old girl who had been raped. What would happen, he asked himself, if the girl's father became so outraged that he killed the rapist?

Grisham couldn't get this story out of his head. Soon he was getting up at 5 a.m. with a notepad, writing chapter after chapter of his first courtroom drama. It took three years to finish the manuscript, and another year of rejections by dozens of companies, before Wynwood Press published 5,000 copies in 1988.

But there was more to this process than telling a story that was in his head and heart.

"While I was writing 'A Time to Kill,' I read everything that was on the New York Times list," said Grisham, at a Baylor University conference called "Art & Soul" in March, 2000. "Most of it, I said to myself, 'I can do better than this.' A lot of it, I said, 'I'll never be that good.' "

Grisham realized that he was not writing the first legal thriller. So he read the competition and he learned the rules -- the writing style of the marketplace in which he would have to compete. He created a likable hero and then he ensnared him in a dangerous conspiracy. Then he carefully plotted a way to get him out of that mess, with as many entertaining twists and turns along the way as possible to create tension.

"I didn't invent that," said Grisham.

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