much ado about Nothing... but Dust

It never fails to amuse me when Americans ban British children’s books and it wasn’t a great surprise to hear that The Golden Compass film has been banned in a number of US states. Not only are the Catholics claiming it’s anti-Catholic (which it probably is), but other Christian groups are claiming it’s anti-Christian full-stop.

Donna Freitas writes that the Pullman series is quite the opposite. She suggests that Pullman re-appropriates the holy trinity for the feminine and proposes the existence of god (through Dust), rather than of God. I’d have thought the notion that the book kills the concept of God, rather than the idea of god, and that it opposes the institutionalising, and the cult, of religion rather than the dissolution of belief, was fairly obvious, but I guess for a number of orthodox Christians who can’t quite see over their cassocks, let alone at some truths that might lie in the depths of a children’s story, this could seem a real and tangible threat to their comfortable hierarchies. What I think the series kills is a man’s right to stand in for an abstract concept he cannot begin to understand and yet claims to act and speak on behalf of, casting judgements, and imposing such orders as the banning of a children’s film, in the name of!



(Click on the pics for both articles by Freitas)

Technorati Tags:
the feminine in the divine, the female holy spirit, northern lights, his dark materials, the golden compasses, christians getting their cassocks in a knot, catholics lose their God to god