Fighting Chance
“Give faith a fighting chance.”
— Lee Ann Womack
On this date in 1959, the film “On the Beach” opened worldwide.
From a site on Nevil Shute, author of the book on which the film was based:
The New York Daily News (December 18, 1959) condemned the film:
“This is a would-be shocker which plays right up the alley of a) the Kremlin and b) the Western defeatists and/or traitors who yelp for the scrapping of the H-bomb. … See this picture if you must (it seems bound to be much talked about), but keep in mind that the thinking it represents points the way toward eventual Communist enslavement of the entire human race.”
Another film, based on an author who certainly opposed Communist enslavement, opens worldwide today: the final installment of Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.”
To give, as Lee Ann Womack recommends, this author’s theological views a fighting chance, see a Christianity Today article, Saint J. R. R. the Evangelist.
Personally, I have come to believe that Tolkien’s religion, Roman Catholicism, is more like Grima Wormtongue‘s than like Gandalf’s.
Material related to this view may be found in my journal archive for March 2003.
For some philosophical remarks that avoid the lunacy of Christianity, see Faith.
Another admirable work by the author of these eminently sensible remarks, Richard Robinson of Oriel College, Oxford, is one of the best books I have ever encountered: