We all have our own gatewayformative blockbuster. For me, first contact came during the hot summer of 1997 when a summer-camp trip to the movies sent me down a wormhole with Jodie Foster. Contact, Robert Zemeckiss sprawling, melancholy movie about Ellie Arroway (Foster), the scientist who first detects a signal from another world, may not be a box-office champ or a pure classic. But the movie, which came out 20 years ago today, set a marker for what smart, emotionally compelling science fiction can look like. And thinkingback on it as a professional critic, I see that Contact is one of the Rosetta stones that helps me understand why I love what I love today.

In Contact, Ellie (played as a little girl by Jena Malone) grows up with a father who teaches her to monitor shortwave radio frequencies and nurtures her love of the stars before dying, leaving her an orphan at age 9. As an adult, she becomes a talented scientist whose peers believe she is wasting her time and energy on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. But after she receives funding from a reclusive billionaire (John Hurt), Ellie discovers unambiguous evidence that someone is out there, and decodes the message they have sent, which turns out to be schematics for a mysterious machine.

Unlike in most movies about contact with aliens, the extraterrestrials inContact are almost peripheral. Its the conflicts between humans that matter.

Ellies opponents are people like David Drumlin (Tom Skerritt), who favors applied science and pulls her funding in an effort to push her onto what he sees as an appropriate career path; national security adviser Michael Kitz (James Woods), who wants to militarize the work on Ellies discovery; and Richard Rank (Rob Lowe, weaponizing his handsomeness), the leader of a Christian Coalition-type organization who tries to stymie Ellies work on the grounds that aliens might not share human morality. The things that divide them are not how seriously they take an obvious alien threat, the tension in so many first-contact movies, but what counts as a worthy goal in science, who should control major advances and once the machine turns out to be a transport who should represent humanity to the stars. The big explosion, when it comes, is not the result of an alien attack, but a suicide bomber who believes we should stay here on Earth.

Its not so much the hard science fiction in Contact that has stayed with me as the films sense of whats important. Whats most realistic and compelling about the movie is its understated curiosity about how humanity would respond to a discovery of this magnitude. Contact, like Kim Stanley Robinsons Mars trilogy, is a sharp argument that by skipping to the most dramatic, conflict-oriented outcome, pop culture is leaving dozens of promising stories on the table. There are more things in our arcane policy debates about heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in action filmmakers philosophy.

Ellie herself is a character type thatremains relatively rare: a brilliant scientist who is passionate, enthusiastic, occasionally girly. Contact is a movie that doesnt think female characters have to be only one thing.

While the characters in the movie sometimes punish Ellie for being emotional, Contact itself never does. Of course it makes sense that she would have strong reactions to the degradation of the scientific research she believes in, or to Drumlins tendency to run her down and then claim credit for her work. Her alternately quavering and furious response to the panel that has convened to select the first passenger to another part of the universe doesnt demonstrate weakness. Instead, Ellies response reveals the hypocrisy of Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey), who exposes her agnosticism because he wants to keep her safe on Earth, and the scheming of Drumlin, who fakes a piety he doesnt really feel to outflank her. Fosters limpid eyes and quivering chin are some of Contacts best special effects.

In keeping with that confident approach to emotion, Contact isnt afraid to be a sweeping romance in whichbig ideas fuel chemistry. Ellie and Palmers meet-cute involves his research on the impact of technology on indigenous communities; the first thing that attracts her to him, beyond McConaugheys laconic charm, is Palmers defense of pure rather than merely applied science. Ideas, particularly Palmers conviction that aliens first contact should be with someone who believes in God, keep them apart for much of the movie, which is realistic: Ellie would be hopelessly compromised if she threw over her lifes work for the theologian who blocks her from her dearest ambition, even if he is drawling and cute. Palmers big romantic gesture is to show up and supportEllie when she gets the opportunity to be the one to make first contact after Drumlin is killed in a terrorist attack. Intellectual arguments dont substitute for sexual heat in Contact theyare the heat.

Fosters performance as Ellie isnt aggressive or extravagant; it doesnt loom over the movies that have followed it.But I think of her every time I watch Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) head off into the abyss to try to save humanity in Interstellar, or Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) struggle to save herself in Gravity. Ellies cerebral, optimistic quest to prove we arent alone in the universe is a counterpoint to Ellen Ripleys (Sigourney Weaver) ferocious battle for survival in the Alien franchise, an argument that in space, no one can hear you scream, but someone just might introduce you to the greatest secrets of the universe.

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20 years after 'Contact' came out, the rest of pop culture still hasn't caught up - Washington Post

A danger of having a priest for a dad: he just might write a homily about you. At nineteen, shortly after running away with a man she met on an online poetry forum, Patricia Lockwood found herself sitting in church one Sunday, listening to her dad preach a homily titled The Prodigal Daughter.

Lockwood took it in stride. At the time my reaction alternated between embarrassment and amusement, but now I see it must have been prophetic, she writes in her memoir, Priestdaddy. All these years I have been tending the pigs of liberalism, agnosticism, poetry, fornication, cussing, salad-eating, and wanting to visit Europe, but I am back home now, and the pigs can't come with me.

Twelve years after she first leaves the rectory, a series of misfortunes leaves Lockwood and her husband, Jason, jobless and broke. With nowhere else to go, the couple pack up their belongings and moves into the Kansas City rectory shared by Lockwoods mother, Karen, and her father Greg, a Roman Catholic priest.

Lockwoods situation is improbable in a lot of ways, the least of which is having a married Catholic priest for a father; as she puts it, the mercy of the church exists for me on this earth in an unusually patriarchal form. And although she never attended college, Lockwood has published poetry in The New Yorker and the London Review of Books, amassed over sixty-seven-thousand Twitter followers, and earned a significant cult following for her dark, subversive sense of humor.

Lockwood had previously published two books of poetry, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, but living with her parents inspired her to try a new writing project: recording life with her irrepressible and quirky family. The result is Priestdaddy, a wry, observant, and funnyif ultimately unevenaccount of growing up in possibly the most Catholic of Catholic families.

Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Lockwood was raised in all the worst cities of the Midwest, moving each time her father was assigned to a new parish. In an interview with the New York Times Magazine, Lockwood recalls living in five different rectories and attending six different schools. Growing up, her life (unsurprisingly) revolved around the Catholic Church. She sang in a choir and attended a youth group called Gods Gang that was 40 percent shag carpet and 60 percent Bible verses.

After a whirlwind internet courtship, Lockwoods husband Jason proposed to her in the parking lot of a Krogers grocery store (the most matrimonial of all grocery stores) the first time they met in person. They spent the next twelve years roaming the country while Jason worked as a newspaper editor and Lockwood wrote poetry. After she left home, Lockwood also quietly left the Catholic Church. It was like forgetting a language you spoke a long time ago, when you were a child, she says. During the eight months they live in her fathers rectory, Lockwood isthrown out of the bohemian, free-wheeling life she and Jason created for themselves and back into a world where dinner with the bishop is the social event of the month.

Lockwood is in a unique position to rediscover this world, and she generally does so with astuteness and a wicked sense of humor. She hasnt forgotten the language of her former homeland so much as turn[ed] it inside out, repurpose[ed] it, and occasionally use[d] it to tell jokes. Her poetry experiments with explicit sexual humor and religious imagery, but Priestdaddy is more concerned with rediscovering a world Lockwood chose to leave, and finding her new place in it. Back again in that world, Lockwood reexamines her upbringing, her family, and her former church. She treats her eight-month stay in the rectory as an anthropological mission of sorts, reexamining the terrain of her childhood. Everyone gets a window. This is what mine looks out at, she writes.

Priestdaddy jumps seamlessly back and forth between past and present. Memories from the authors Midwestern childhood are interrupted by sketches of daily life at the rectory: Karen reading about demonic rosaries on the internet or Greg playing his electric guitar with a tone-deaf enthusiasm that sounds like a whole band dying in a plane crash in 1972.

According to his daughter, Fr. Greg doesn't have a conversion story; he has an origin story, like Superman or Batman. This tells you everything you need to know about Greg Lockwood and his larger-than-life personality. Greg met Karen in high school, married at eighteen, and joined the Navy. Onboard the nuclear submarine the USS Flying Fish, he experienced what he calls the deepest conversion on record. His daughter attributes his conversion to the seventy-two times the crew watched The Exorcist over the course of the patrol. You're a drop of blood at the center of the ocean. All of a sudden you look up at a screen and see a possessed twelve-year-old with violent bedhead vomiting green chunks and backwards Latin, Lockwood writes. You would convert too, I guarantee it.

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The Most Catholic of Catholic Families - Commonweal

It is better to be united in our ignorance than divided in our certainties.

Credit: Flickr/SteveRhodes. Some rights reserved.

From time to time stories appear in our newspapers of priests or ministersmaybe even a bishopwho have lost their faith. Such headlines are misleading and far too simplistic. It is not faith which is lost, but beliefs: by contrast, faith is transformed.

Beliefs can be naturally outgrown and discarded during our lives as we fulfill St Pauls eloquent prophecy: When I was a child I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things.

Although this process ought to continue throughout life, for a priest or minister it is most comfortably achieved after one is retired. Working clergy may regard it as their duty to defend the system, to loyally justify the church, to be sensitive to the feelings of its people, and to take care not to destroy another persons faith.

But all of these things can make us more cautious than we would like to be. That is important, because spiritual growth and development must be continuous, even if that means leapingnot lapsinginto agnosticism, recognizing that there is much of mystery in life and that we do not know all the answers.

At the heart of this process we come to see Christianityalong with Judaism and Islammore as historical religions than simply faith-based; man-made rather than divinely created. As such, they have to be judged by the evidence of history, and their scriptures scrutinized just like any other historical document.

History may then indicate that all ancient religionsand maybe some modern creeds toohave arisen largely out of pre-scientific mythologies in which what is called the supernatural lies at the center. An essential aspect of growing up demands that we reject the idea of the supernatural and recognize that the natural is wonderful enough.

Few people can deny that Christianity has often been a form of blessing to many people, and that the church has sometimes been beneficial to the improvement of human society. In the realm of the arts, in music, painting and literature, religious belief has inspired incomparable beauty and innovation; and in human behavior, incredible heroism and self-sacrifice.

But there is a darker side which, in our growing, we increasingly come to see as outweighing the lighter on the scales of human judgment. Dogma has dominated reason. Superstitions have been encouraged as facts. Charity and love have been subordinated to inquisition and cruelty. Fear has governed where hope should have reigned. The wisdom and experience of half of humankindwomenhas been ignored and belittled.

A distorted picture has emerged and prevailed over the original teachings of the guru of Christianity: Jesus. Growing up entails re-evaluating the one who saw himself as the son of man, rather than the son of God.

In no area of life can this process of transformation be seen more clearly than in the realm of morality. So it is not surprising that this subject has come to the fore, and that the issues involved have received more attention in the 20th and 21st centuriesespecially in the aftermath of the Second World War during which human immorality was exposed in all its naked horror. It really did seem possible that after 1945 that humankind might come of age.

In the years that followed, the issue of sexuality in particular came to dominate both thought and practice. Liberation became the buzzword in theology, in personal and social relationships, in race relations and in national aspirations. Andif at times this led in destructive or uncomfortable directions for someso be it, for we have come to realize that it is better to be united in our ignorance than divided in our certainties.

That, surely, is a sign of maturity.

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Face to faith - Open Democracy

IN general, the South African Constitution, as is clear from its preamble where reference to deity occurs, reflects a bias in favour of religion, as opposed to atheism and agnosticism. This bias in favour of religion is a departure from the pure principle of equality between believers and non-believers as set out in section nine.

In particular, section 15 of the Constitution provides that everyone has the right to freedom of conscience, religion, belief and opinion. It states further that religious observances may be conducted at state and state-aided institutions provided that:

those observances follow rules made by appropriate authorities;

they are conducted on an equitable basis; and

attendance at them is free and voluntary.

This provision obviously reflects a bias in favour of religion in general, unlike the position in the United States where religious exercises, such as prayers, are not permitted in the schools. In the U.S., the idea of neutrality does not even permit one minute of silence for meditation or voluntary prayer.

How section 15 is actually interpreted and applied in practice is a great challenge, particularly when there is a dominant religion, as is the position in South Africa,with the Christian religion.

So for instance, mandatory school prayers obviously constitute a violation of religious freedom, but even voluntary prayers could constitute a violation by putting pressure on children to participate. Also, is it practical to allow for religious observances for every religious faith, regardless of how large or small their representation in a school?

It is therefore the interpretation of the above provision of the Constitution, which is central to the recent landmark judgment of Judge Willem van der Linde in the South Gauteng High Court, in which he categorically ruled against the promotion of one religious denomination over any other at public schools by declaring that neither a school governing body nor a public school may lawfully hold that it subscribes to only a particular religion to the exclusion of others.

This seminal judgment was initiated in May by the Organisation for Religious Education and Democracy (Ogod), which brought an application to the high court seeking an order ruling against having a dominant religion observed in public schools.

It had profound reservations about the practices of scripture reading and singing of hymns in assembly, and the decoration of the walls of the school with Bible verses.

It was argued by the schools in question that as a result of religious freedom they are entitled to have an ethos or character, determined by their governing bodies, based on the community that feeds the schools with pupils. This reflects a conservative or fundamentalist Christian theological approach, as expressed by the Christian View Network, which did not approve of the ruling by Van der Linde. However, such an approach must inevitably lead to the domination of one religion over others.

Ogod brought the application against six Afrikaans state schools.

The gravamen of its argument was that the religious practices at these schools gave rise to the suppression of the scientific teaching of evolution, and a dogmatic religious ethos that in effect was a form of coercion and a gross abuse of the rights of pupils.

In his judgment, Van der Linde declared that public schools are indeed not rarefied but public ones that need to achieve universal and non-discriminatory access to education.

Referring to section 15 of the Constitution, the judge stated that provision for religious policies and observances must be conducted on a free, voluntary and equitable basis. As a result, he declared unequivocally that in this country, our diversity is celebrated, not tolerated.

He therefore questioned the acceptance by schools using rules laid down by the governing body, to hold out to be exclusively a single denomination, be it Christian, Muslim, Buddhist or atheist. What is clear from the judgment is that although religious observances and practices in schools are permissible, protecting children from coercion is essential. This allows broad-based religious education, rather than dogmatic instruction that promotes one religion over another.

It is therefore, according to Reverend Ian Booth, chairperson of Diakonia Council of Churches, not the responsibility of public schools to teach and instruct children in their respective faiths. This should be done in places of worship.

This is the viewpoint of a minister with a liberal Christian theology, in contrast with that expressed by the Christian View Network. In the pluralistic society that South Africa is, cultural and religious tolerance are essential for social cohesion.

This is necessary to protect our celebrated diversity. In this regard, Van Lindes judgment makes a fundamentally sound contribution to our jurisprudence, which has been widely welcomed by most religious commentators, who include leaders in the Hindu, Tamil, Muslim and Christian faiths.

George Devenish is an emeritus professor at UKZN and one of the scholars who assisted in drafting the Interim Constitution in 1993.

24.com encourages commentary submitted via MyNews24. Contributions of 200 words or more will be considered for publication.

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Celebrating diversity - News24