Faith Digest

Posted: 3/16/07

Faith Digest

Beliefnet recognizes movies Oscar neglected. The Beliefnet Film Awards are in, and the winners didn’t necessarily coincide with the Oscar list. The Beliefnet awards select the best spiritual film, performance and documentary of 2006. Each category had two winners, one named by a panel of judges and the other chosen by visitors to Beliefnet.com. The judges chose Children of Men—the story of a young woman in an infertile world—as the year’s best spiritual film, although the movie didn’t even get an Academy Award nomination for best motion picture Beliefnet.com visitors chose The Pursuit of Happyness, the story of a homeless man and his son trying to get off the streets of San Francisco, as their favorite spiritual film and selected the film’s star, Will Smith, as the year’s best spiritual performance. But the judges sided with the Academy in the best-performance category, naming Jennifer Hudson, of Dreamgirls. Hudson won a supporting actress Oscar for her role as Effie White. The panel’s choice for best spiritual documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, also coincided with the Academy’s selection. The documentary featuring former Vice President Al Gore is a cautionary tale about the burgeoning problem of global warming. But the People’s Award for documentary went to Shakespeare Behind Bars, about the unique gifts and talents of prisoners in a Kentucky correctional facility.

Biblical translator Metzger dies. Bruce Metzger, a revered biblical scholar who was both respected and sometimes criticized for championing the use of modern language in translating the Bible, died Feb. 13. Metzger, 93, was a long-time professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and a towering figure for students who used to joke that he had actually written the Bible himself. Metzger is likely to be best remembered as the editor of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, a work introduced in 1989 that eliminated many, though not all, of the Bible’s masculine pronouns. It became the standard text used in many colleges, seminaries and divinity schools. That work was an extension of the Revised Standard Version, which was released in its full version almost 40 years earlier and eschewed much of the archaic language of the King James Bible. Metzger served on the translation team for the Revised Standard Version, which was the first to use material from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Catholics, Assemblies report rapid growth. The Roman Catholic Church grew to 69.1 million members in 2005, making it the fastest-growing church in the country, followed closely by the Assemblies of God and the Mormons. Catholics grew 1.94 percent in 2005, Assemblies of God grew 1.86 percent and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints grew 1.63 percent, according to the 2007 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, produced by the National Council of Churches. It is widely considered the most authoritative source on church membership statistics. The 2007 Yearbook contains data from 2005 that were reported in 2006. Rankings of the top 10 largest U.S. churches did not change from last year. Catholics remain the largest group, followed by the Southern Baptist Convention, the United Methodist Church, Mormons and the Church of God in Christ.

Facing the Giants big on video. In its first two weeks on the market, the Christian movie Facing the Giants was among the 20 best-selling videos and DVDs, according to the trade publication Video Business. The movie, created by Baptist pastors in Georgia for $100,000, is about a high school football team and coach who overcome numerous challenges—their giants—with divine assistance. It was released in theaters Sept. 29 and reportedly is among the top 10 all-time highest-grossing evangelical movies, earning $10 million at the box office.