The ten suggestions?
Garvey, John
OF SEVERAL MINDS JOHN CARVEY THE TEN SWGGESTIONS? The 'Times' does the Decalogue nt is a common complaint that religion is not dealt with well in the media, which, when it doesn't just plain get...
...A West Point cadet hopes that his own life will honor that of his father, who died in .combat...
...Perhaps this says less about the shortcomings of the particular series than about what religion at the popular level has become in our time...
...As I said, there were good moments...
...If the idea behind the series was that violating what many of us agree are good ethical suggestions will have consequences, and keeping them may be a good idea, it is an idea that hardly needed defending...
...So a series which appeared recently in the New York Times (December 15-24, 2002) looked promising...
...What was never part of the series was the idea that the Ten Commandments were in fact commandments, that God was their source, that violating them leads to something more serious than an unhappy life, and that keeping them may not lead to a happy life...
...He speaks not only honestly about what it means to have killed someone, but also in a way that moves beyond self-justification (he doesn't come close to this...
...Where the series worked, it did so by showing the distorting effect of a particular passion gone wrong, or the way in which an attempt to honor the Sabbath, or a parent, can lead to growth...
...Another piece perhaps the most effective was about a soldier who, after killing many people in Vietnam, went on to become an Episcopalian bishop...
...The piece on coveting has to do with one of the disciples of self-help guru Anthony J. Robbins, whose teachings "empower" his fans to do whatever they want most, which is usually make a lot of money...
...The author was Chris Hedges, a good reporter, and the idea was a creative one...
...Nowhere here was there a sense of the God who thunders at Job out of a whirlwind, or hands the tablets to Moses after Moses has climbed into the darkness to get them...
...Now it's all about us, our feelings, and our dreams, one of which might be that there is a God...but not the kind who would or could command us to do anything at all.ything at all...
...There was such a thing as adultery before the commandment against it, and there are proscriptions against stealing and adultery and murder in many religious and nonreligious traditions...
...If this is all that the series intended to say, the framework of the Ten Commandments was not necessary...
...It is good to point out that sin (though the word was not used in the article) has consequences not only for the sinner...
...And he speaks of how the act of killing another human being, even when perhaps justified in war, can have terrible personal consequences...
...But even believers are not particularly literate or well informed about their own traditions, much less the traditions of others...
...Still, when religion was mentioned at all in the series, it was often in the watered-down way that one might expect from someone nervous in the presence of the subject...
...For example, the piece on adultery dealt with the son of an adulterer...and on how much the sins of the father had blighted his life and his relationships with other people...
...Their rabbi solves the problem by suggesting that God doesn't really make things happen, that God doesn't will good or evil...
...This has been blamed on the fact that those involved in reporting tend not to be religious themselves...
...But to discuss the Ten Commandments while saying very little about the relationships with God of the people whose stories are told here, or with the idea that these are divinely inspired commandments whose violation involves what has traditionally been called sin, made for a curiously attenuated presentation...
...A couple of people who have competing chess shops speak bitterly about the rivalry, each justifying his own position...
...The first story in the series was about parents whose young daughter's death understandably made them radically and angrily question God...
...These suggestions sound more deistic than Judaic...
...That may have something to do with it, but it hardly explains the phenomenon...
...This is curious because Hedges's father was a minister and the reporter himself attended Harvard Divinity School...
...The series had its good moments...
...A woman who embezzled funds still struggles to understand what happened to her...
...The 'Times' does the Decalogue nt is a common complaint that religion is not dealt with well in the media, which, when it doesn't just plain get things wrong, tends to concentrate on either the dullest institutional aspects of religion ("Southern Baptists Get New Head") or with scandal (you know what...
...In a piece on honoring the Sabbath, a couple of young doctors celebrate the Sabbath in a way that certainly takes the idea of religious tradition into account, as they themselves struggle with aspects of belief...
...Inspired in part by Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Decalogue, it dealt with the Ten Commandments and tried to explore ways they affect the lives of real people...
...A significant number of journalists are believers...
...Both the dull and scandalous stories deserve coverage, but the way in which religion really affects the lives of people in a country that is the most religiously diverse, and religiously active, on Earth, is almost never mentioned...
Vol. 130 • January 2003 • No. 2
