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1. The Christian feel good movie of the summer: PG

Facing the Giants is a faith-filled football film, which "resembles a fusion of the Book of Job and a homemade Hoosiers," reports Terry Mattingly. The film is scheduled to open in 380 theaters in September. Alex and Stephen Kendrick, brothers and associate pastors of media at Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia, wrote and produced the film, and naturally, they gave it an overt Christian message.

Mattingly writes, "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." It also includes a scene in which the football team's coach tells a player to follow Jesus.

That scene, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, seems to be on par with brief nudity—either of which is enough to turn a G film into a PG one. Facing the Giants, which has no nudity, is too evangelistic for parents to think it is safe for children to watch without parental guidance, says the MPAA. Kris Fuhr, vice president for marketing at Provident Films, said the MPAA told her 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."

2. Savagery's stranglehold

We Americans have high ideals for our soldiers. We honor them for securing our freedom, and we expect them to enter into the barbarity of war and remain civilized, moral Americans. We are horrified when soldiers act as barbaric as the battles they are in, and we find their moral lapses equally as defeating as losses on the battlefield.

We hope that a technologically sophisticated "shock and awe" campaign will keep our soldiers from the messy realities of war. But when the best technology isn't enough, and our soldiers, despite themselves, fail, we wonder, "If our soldiers stoop to the level of the terrorists, what are fighting for anyway?"

The killings last November in Haditha are only the most recent example. The Washington Postcalled the incident one of the "potentially most embarrassing and damaging events of the Iraq war, one that some say may surpass the detainee abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison." But, why do we expect perfect behavior from soldiers at war?

David Brooks comments on the predicament of our soldiers in his New York Times column:

We have all been raised on stories in which good triumphs over evil, and in these stories good does not triumph by chance. It triumphs because honesty, virtue and decency pay off in the long run. Evil, meanwhile, contains the seeds of its own destruction. Those who lie, torture, and kill eventually become entrapped by their own sins.

In Iraq at the moment, however, savagery seems to be triumphing over decency. The insurgents and the militias—who kill and maim with abandon—appear to be wearing away the morale of those who seek a decent, democratic nation.

Moreover, they are winning precisely because they are savage, and are proud to do things their enemies are ashamed to do.

For the most part, our soldiers have resisted the barbaric behavior of their enemies. "Because American troops come from the culture they do, they have not become the sort of people they would have to be to defeat the insurgents at their own game," Brooks says.

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June (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50