Today, I'm sharing over at Transpositions.
Author’s Note: This article contains spoilers for the 2006 film Babel.
Last week, Christ and Pop Culture published an excellent article, “Counting Moral Indiscretions Is Not a Movie Review,” which left me considering films that I have watched and found theologically significant and have been dismayed to learn have been labeled morally bankrupt by Christian reviewers.
For instance, the 2006 film Babel combines multiple storylines as well as countries, spanning Morocco, the US, Mexico, and Japan, spiraling out from the inciting incident of an American tourist being shot on holiday in Morocco. The film garnered seven Academy Award nominations and was shortlisted by a number of critics, like Roger Ebert, as one of the best films of 2006.
But for all its poise, Babel is not without objectionable content. A central character in the narrative, Chieko, a Japanese teenager who is both deaf and functionally mute and whose mother recently committed suicide, frequently attempts to compensate for her feeling of isolation and abandonment by attracting men. Rarely is this successful, but we are not spared her attempts. Early in the film, Chieko removes her underwear and then twice lifts her skirt on camera to try and attract the attention of a group of boys sitting at a nearby table in a café.
Keep reading this piece over at Transpositions?
Today, I'm offering a different take on the wonderful new book from Rachel Held Evans ...
In his review of Rachel Held Evans’ recent and somewhat controversial book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband Master (Thomas Nelson, 2012), Richard Beck identified Rachel’s project—a year spent following certain aspects of the Bible’s teaching concerning women as literally as possible—to be “hermeneutical performance art.”
