DVD Talk review of 'Jesus Camp'
12-31-06, 05:40 PM
#26
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Originally Posted by Mr. Salty
Actually, I would disagree pretty strongly.
I look forward to watching on DVD though.
01-01-07, 08:11 PM
#27
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Artman, I'm glad you will see the DVD. Just keep in mind that it is full of sound bytes with no context. And, of course, speaking in tongues never looks good on film. My point (about the fact that these kids have fun) was not to minimize the soberness of spiritual things, but to emphasize that Jesus gave us joy and life abundantly. These kids are experiencing that. Millions of Christians in the U.S. speak in tongues regularly. I think many people are curious about that. The film provides them a peek.
01-01-07, 10:35 PM
#28
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Originally Posted by Troi
The film provides them a peek.
The kids were great though, personality-wise. I didn't like seeing them reduced to tears in some parts, but I could still see the child-like innocence and joy they had in other scenes(for the most part).
I can only imagine how heartbroken Levi must've been when the truth about Ted Haggard was revealed. He probably looked up to him (like his whole congregation I assume) That's a shame and drove me nuts everytime Haggard was onscreen.
01-01-07, 10:49 PM
#29
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Originally Posted by Troi
Millions of Christians in the U.S. speak in tongues regularly..
You gotta be shittin' me, LOL. Maybe in foreign tongues!
Sheesh. I might've found me a new signature with that one.
01-02-07, 12:04 AM
#30
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Originally Posted by Troi
Millions of Christians in the U.S. speak in tongues regularly.
01-02-07, 10:01 AM
#31
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Levi actually handled the Ted Haggard thing pretty well. His family did not know much about Ted Haggard before the film. The film crew invited them out to Haggard's church because they wanted to give the film a bigger feel. So there were no real relationships there.
We all wish the film was less political. If you hung around Becky's ministry you would not get the sense that it was political. The film simply highlighted everything and anything that could be taken as political.
I didn't mean to get into a big discussion about tongues, but in my county there are probably 12 out of 60 churches that are charasmatic churches (where speaking in tongues is a normal expression of faith). Several other main-line churches have charasmatic prayergroups and such. I also know a group of Baptist ladies who speak in tongues. The way I understand Scriptures is that there are different ways that tongues manifest: speaking a listener's language, edifying oneself, and intercessory prayer. Tongues happened to me personally when I was a teenager. I was gathered with a group of youth and we were praying for someone that needed urgent prayer. I was suddenly realizing that I did not know how to pray for this person. At that moment another language came out. The one thing I remember was feeling as though the Spirit Himself was giving me the words. I've practiced it ever since and have found it useful to me personally.
My church (Levi's church) is charasmatic but tongues are not emphasized. Probably 30-50% of the people speak in tongues. I understand with the upcoming release of the DVD (Jan 23) that Levi's family and others have opened up a blog (www.jesuscampers.com) to speak to their side of the story of the movie.
We all wish the film was less political. If you hung around Becky's ministry you would not get the sense that it was political. The film simply highlighted everything and anything that could be taken as political.
I didn't mean to get into a big discussion about tongues, but in my county there are probably 12 out of 60 churches that are charasmatic churches (where speaking in tongues is a normal expression of faith). Several other main-line churches have charasmatic prayergroups and such. I also know a group of Baptist ladies who speak in tongues. The way I understand Scriptures is that there are different ways that tongues manifest: speaking a listener's language, edifying oneself, and intercessory prayer. Tongues happened to me personally when I was a teenager. I was gathered with a group of youth and we were praying for someone that needed urgent prayer. I was suddenly realizing that I did not know how to pray for this person. At that moment another language came out. The one thing I remember was feeling as though the Spirit Himself was giving me the words. I've practiced it ever since and have found it useful to me personally.
My church (Levi's church) is charasmatic but tongues are not emphasized. Probably 30-50% of the people speak in tongues. I understand with the upcoming release of the DVD (Jan 23) that Levi's family and others have opened up a blog (www.jesuscampers.com) to speak to their side of the story of the movie.
01-29-07, 03:18 PM
#33
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I think Alexandra Pelosi's "road trip" documentary that was on HBO last night probably portrayed the evangelical community more accurately than "Jesus Camp," especially to the extent that using Pentecostal churches to represent that larger movement isn't really accurate.
I grew up in the south, and I am now an overeducated New Yorker, so it's interesting that people on the coasts have suddenly discovered evangelicals, and respond to them simultaneously as a weird anthropological phenomenon and as a very frightening constituency in the American political culture.
This stems somewhat from the widely held assessment that the 2004 presidential election, which most sophisticated types felt should have been a referendum on Bush's foreign policy, somehow became a contest about gay marriage.
Divorced from the political implications, evangelicals strike people as weird. They mash their theology up with the coarsest parts of pop culture and cloying, new-agey platitudes about love and personal friendships with God, and they come out with a faith that I think many people in more cosmopolitan circles would find aesthetically offensive and extremely middlebrow as a faith. It seems like everything that cosmopolitan, city-dweller types tend to find coarse or low in pop culture has actually been intergrated by evangelicals into their faith.
I think Pelosi responded this way as well, and she couldn't resist presenting the novelty of the Christian hot-rodders in the Burger King parking lot, or the Christian wrestlers. I think many people I know would think that Christian rock sounds like bad Nickelback cover bands (Nickelback epitomizing badness) and that evangelical "purpose-driven" pop-theology is pretty soft-boiled.
The movement also seems to be incredibly intellectually reductive in terms of its positions on science. Evangelical movements employ a handful of media-savvy expert-types who have ostensibly impressive credentials and are employed to present creationism in terms that make it look indistinguishable from real science to a lay audience. To the base, the pitch is much simpler; the Bible says so, and that's all you need or want to know.
Devout people here would never be so thoughtless about religion; certainly the observant people I know look to religion as a path to answers, or a starting point toward Purpose or Truth. The evangelical approach seems to be an uncritical acceptance of the fact that, by choosing to be "born again," all matters are thereafter resolved, and that they are redeemed by Christ's love, and close personal amigos with the honcho upstairs, and therefore any further philosophizing or pondering is beside the point.
Of course, devout people I know would never worship in a converted basketball arena or in any edifice with its own food court.
Pelosi responds by zooming way in on people's faces to make them look weird or ugly, and centering her compositions, when the opportunity provides itself, on really bad teeth. I think the general thesis of the programs, that, given the opportunity, evangelicals will present themselves in a manner which is appalling to cultured, educated, city-dwellers. But I don't really think that the Christians are stupider or scarier than the lefty anarcho-freaks who spray-painted the Capitol over the weekend.
The bizarreness of the evangelical rhetoric is only a small snapshot of the overwhelming stupidity in the electoral culture. But these people are the unwitting allies of the Republican party. Folks like Reagan and Rumsfeld are the shepherds, folks like Falwell and Robertson are the sheepdogs, and these people are just "the base." They get enough to keep them showing up, but their votes are used in service of an ideology that nobody bothers to tell them about. The ballot stacking svengalis who made a wartime campaign into a gay marriage contest by pushing the issue onto ballots through state constitutional amendments, and the folks fulminating at right wing think tanks, will look more like the people that Pelosi and I might socialize with, and to the extent right-wing ideology is a problem, they're a lot more dangerous than the evangelicals.
I grew up in the south, and I am now an overeducated New Yorker, so it's interesting that people on the coasts have suddenly discovered evangelicals, and respond to them simultaneously as a weird anthropological phenomenon and as a very frightening constituency in the American political culture.
This stems somewhat from the widely held assessment that the 2004 presidential election, which most sophisticated types felt should have been a referendum on Bush's foreign policy, somehow became a contest about gay marriage.
Divorced from the political implications, evangelicals strike people as weird. They mash their theology up with the coarsest parts of pop culture and cloying, new-agey platitudes about love and personal friendships with God, and they come out with a faith that I think many people in more cosmopolitan circles would find aesthetically offensive and extremely middlebrow as a faith. It seems like everything that cosmopolitan, city-dweller types tend to find coarse or low in pop culture has actually been intergrated by evangelicals into their faith.
I think Pelosi responded this way as well, and she couldn't resist presenting the novelty of the Christian hot-rodders in the Burger King parking lot, or the Christian wrestlers. I think many people I know would think that Christian rock sounds like bad Nickelback cover bands (Nickelback epitomizing badness) and that evangelical "purpose-driven" pop-theology is pretty soft-boiled.
The movement also seems to be incredibly intellectually reductive in terms of its positions on science. Evangelical movements employ a handful of media-savvy expert-types who have ostensibly impressive credentials and are employed to present creationism in terms that make it look indistinguishable from real science to a lay audience. To the base, the pitch is much simpler; the Bible says so, and that's all you need or want to know.
Devout people here would never be so thoughtless about religion; certainly the observant people I know look to religion as a path to answers, or a starting point toward Purpose or Truth. The evangelical approach seems to be an uncritical acceptance of the fact that, by choosing to be "born again," all matters are thereafter resolved, and that they are redeemed by Christ's love, and close personal amigos with the honcho upstairs, and therefore any further philosophizing or pondering is beside the point.
Of course, devout people I know would never worship in a converted basketball arena or in any edifice with its own food court.
Pelosi responds by zooming way in on people's faces to make them look weird or ugly, and centering her compositions, when the opportunity provides itself, on really bad teeth. I think the general thesis of the programs, that, given the opportunity, evangelicals will present themselves in a manner which is appalling to cultured, educated, city-dwellers. But I don't really think that the Christians are stupider or scarier than the lefty anarcho-freaks who spray-painted the Capitol over the weekend.
The bizarreness of the evangelical rhetoric is only a small snapshot of the overwhelming stupidity in the electoral culture. But these people are the unwitting allies of the Republican party. Folks like Reagan and Rumsfeld are the shepherds, folks like Falwell and Robertson are the sheepdogs, and these people are just "the base." They get enough to keep them showing up, but their votes are used in service of an ideology that nobody bothers to tell them about. The ballot stacking svengalis who made a wartime campaign into a gay marriage contest by pushing the issue onto ballots through state constitutional amendments, and the folks fulminating at right wing think tanks, will look more like the people that Pelosi and I might socialize with, and to the extent right-wing ideology is a problem, they're a lot more dangerous than the evangelicals.
01-30-07, 11:56 AM
#34
DVD Talk Legend
Originally Posted by Numanoid
And 99-100% of those people are faking it. Speaking in tongues is a gift of the spirit that means you can walk into a foreign country and preach to them in their native language, without ever having learned that language yourself. It does NOT mean rolling around on the floor talking gibberish, or "angelic" languages. Anyone that does that is faking it, by definition.
For the non-informed, the VAST majority of Christian churches in the world don't subscibe to the "speaking in tongues" gibberish seen in Jesus Camp. That was my biggest problem with the movie...non-church goers are going to come away thinking that's how all Christian churches act/teach.
01-30-07, 10:05 PM
#35
DVD Talk Legend
Originally Posted by ScandalUMD
I think Alexandra Pelosi's "road trip" documentary that was on HBO last night probably portrayed the evangelical community more accurately than "Jesus Camp," especially to the extent that using Pentecostal churches to represent that larger movement isn't really accurate.
I grew up in the south, and I am now an overeducated New Yorker, so it's interesting that people on the coasts have suddenly discovered evangelicals, and respond to them simultaneously as a weird anthropological phenomenon and as a very frightening constituency in the American political culture.
This stems somewhat from the widely held assessment that the 2004 presidential election, which most sophisticated types felt should have been a referendum on Bush's foreign policy, somehow became a contest about gay marriage.
Divorced from the political implications, evangelicals strike people as weird. They mash their theology up with the coarsest parts of pop culture and cloying, new-agey platitudes about love and personal friendships with God, and they come out with a faith that I think many people in more cosmopolitan circles would find aesthetically offensive and extremely middlebrow as a faith. It seems like everything that cosmopolitan, city-dweller types tend to find coarse or low in pop culture has actually been intergrated by evangelicals into their faith.
I think Pelosi responded this way as well, and she couldn't resist presenting the novelty of the Christian hot-rodders in the Burger King parking lot, or the Christian wrestlers. I think many people I know would think that Christian rock sounds like bad Nickelback cover bands (Nickelback epitomizing badness) and that evangelical "purpose-driven" pop-theology is pretty soft-boiled.
The movement also seems to be incredibly intellectually reductive in terms of its positions on science. Evangelical movements employ a handful of media-savvy expert-types who have ostensibly impressive credentials and are employed to present creationism in terms that make it look indistinguishable from real science to a lay audience. To the base, the pitch is much simpler; the Bible says so, and that's all you need or want to know.
Devout people here would never be so thoughtless about religion; certainly the observant people I know look to religion as a path to answers, or a starting point toward Purpose or Truth. The evangelical approach seems to be an uncritical acceptance of the fact that, by choosing to be "born again," all matters are thereafter resolved, and that they are redeemed by Christ's love, and close personal amigos with the honcho upstairs, and therefore any further philosophizing or pondering is beside the point.
Of course, devout people I know would never worship in a converted basketball arena or in any edifice with its own food court.
Pelosi responds by zooming way in on people's faces to make them look weird or ugly, and centering her compositions, when the opportunity provides itself, on really bad teeth. I think the general thesis of the programs, that, given the opportunity, evangelicals will present themselves in a manner which is appalling to cultured, educated, city-dwellers. But I don't really think that the Christians are stupider or scarier than the lefty anarcho-freaks who spray-painted the Capitol over the weekend.
The bizarreness of the evangelical rhetoric is only a small snapshot of the overwhelming stupidity in the electoral culture. But these people are the unwitting allies of the Republican party. Folks like Reagan and Rumsfeld are the shepherds, folks like Falwell and Robertson are the sheepdogs, and these people are just "the base." They get enough to keep them showing up, but their votes are used in service of an ideology that nobody bothers to tell them about. The ballot stacking svengalis who made a wartime campaign into a gay marriage contest by pushing the issue onto ballots through state constitutional amendments, and the folks fulminating at right wing think tanks, will look more like the people that Pelosi and I might socialize with, and to the extent right-wing ideology is a problem, they're a lot more dangerous than the evangelicals.
I grew up in the south, and I am now an overeducated New Yorker, so it's interesting that people on the coasts have suddenly discovered evangelicals, and respond to them simultaneously as a weird anthropological phenomenon and as a very frightening constituency in the American political culture.
This stems somewhat from the widely held assessment that the 2004 presidential election, which most sophisticated types felt should have been a referendum on Bush's foreign policy, somehow became a contest about gay marriage.
Divorced from the political implications, evangelicals strike people as weird. They mash their theology up with the coarsest parts of pop culture and cloying, new-agey platitudes about love and personal friendships with God, and they come out with a faith that I think many people in more cosmopolitan circles would find aesthetically offensive and extremely middlebrow as a faith. It seems like everything that cosmopolitan, city-dweller types tend to find coarse or low in pop culture has actually been intergrated by evangelicals into their faith.
I think Pelosi responded this way as well, and she couldn't resist presenting the novelty of the Christian hot-rodders in the Burger King parking lot, or the Christian wrestlers. I think many people I know would think that Christian rock sounds like bad Nickelback cover bands (Nickelback epitomizing badness) and that evangelical "purpose-driven" pop-theology is pretty soft-boiled.
The movement also seems to be incredibly intellectually reductive in terms of its positions on science. Evangelical movements employ a handful of media-savvy expert-types who have ostensibly impressive credentials and are employed to present creationism in terms that make it look indistinguishable from real science to a lay audience. To the base, the pitch is much simpler; the Bible says so, and that's all you need or want to know.
Devout people here would never be so thoughtless about religion; certainly the observant people I know look to religion as a path to answers, or a starting point toward Purpose or Truth. The evangelical approach seems to be an uncritical acceptance of the fact that, by choosing to be "born again," all matters are thereafter resolved, and that they are redeemed by Christ's love, and close personal amigos with the honcho upstairs, and therefore any further philosophizing or pondering is beside the point.
Of course, devout people I know would never worship in a converted basketball arena or in any edifice with its own food court.
Pelosi responds by zooming way in on people's faces to make them look weird or ugly, and centering her compositions, when the opportunity provides itself, on really bad teeth. I think the general thesis of the programs, that, given the opportunity, evangelicals will present themselves in a manner which is appalling to cultured, educated, city-dwellers. But I don't really think that the Christians are stupider or scarier than the lefty anarcho-freaks who spray-painted the Capitol over the weekend.
The bizarreness of the evangelical rhetoric is only a small snapshot of the overwhelming stupidity in the electoral culture. But these people are the unwitting allies of the Republican party. Folks like Reagan and Rumsfeld are the shepherds, folks like Falwell and Robertson are the sheepdogs, and these people are just "the base." They get enough to keep them showing up, but their votes are used in service of an ideology that nobody bothers to tell them about. The ballot stacking svengalis who made a wartime campaign into a gay marriage contest by pushing the issue onto ballots through state constitutional amendments, and the folks fulminating at right wing think tanks, will look more like the people that Pelosi and I might socialize with, and to the extent right-wing ideology is a problem, they're a lot more dangerous than the evangelicals.
I watched that today as well. It was interesting all the stuff that Ted had to say knowing what we know now. As far as the large percentage of people speaking in tongues give me a break.
02-01-07, 08:55 AM
#38
Senior Member
I like how Troi registered just to post in this thread three times. I wonder where she went after that?
I plan on renting this with the rest of my "Free Thinker" friends and discuss how this kind of parenting (brainwashing) is destroying the American society.
I plan on renting this with the rest of my "Free Thinker" friends and discuss how this kind of parenting (brainwashing) is destroying the American society.
02-10-07, 10:30 AM
#41
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Sorry, I hadn't checked this blog for a while. I don't know what to comment other than to respond to Shannon Nutt who says tongues throughout the Bible is only to communicate in a foreign language. Actually Paul talks about praying in tongues (I Cor 14:14). Prayer is always talking to God and not to people.
The disciples at Pentecost where not purposefully communicating in toungues to people. They were simply praising God. I am familiar with two instances of someone praying in tongues to simply worship God and someone near them hearing their own language (Korean and Hebrew). The speaker of the tongues didn't have any knowledge of the language they were speaking.
Also I Cor 13 talks about speaking in tongues of men and of angels. I would suppose that if I'm speaking in the tongue of angels, that, in that instance, no man would understand.
By the way, I don't have any problem with Christians who don't speak in tongues. I do not think less of them and I really don't try to convince them of anything. My experience of speaking in tongues happened to me and to be intellectually honest, I can't dismiss it out of hand.
The disciples at Pentecost where not purposefully communicating in toungues to people. They were simply praising God. I am familiar with two instances of someone praying in tongues to simply worship God and someone near them hearing their own language (Korean and Hebrew). The speaker of the tongues didn't have any knowledge of the language they were speaking.
Also I Cor 13 talks about speaking in tongues of men and of angels. I would suppose that if I'm speaking in the tongue of angels, that, in that instance, no man would understand.
By the way, I don't have any problem with Christians who don't speak in tongues. I do not think less of them and I really don't try to convince them of anything. My experience of speaking in tongues happened to me and to be intellectually honest, I can't dismiss it out of hand.
