Dark or Light: you choose

This week's Carnival was sparsely populated, but I did find this excellent message to share from Jay at Living Catholicism: go support good movies! He lists three at this post, coming to a theatre near you:

1. Ten Commandments

2. Bella

3. Noelle

You can follow this link to the post to get a synopsis of each. They sound delightful.

If you haven't heard, the Golden Compass was written by an avowed materialist atheist intentionally trying to present a subversive story to children, his anti-Narnia, so to speak. My assessment, based on the movie slogan, is that the series upholds a Manichaen dualist cosmology- a point on which I've been vindicated. It's a cosmology the author deconstructs (as he is trying to deconstruct all religion except a Randian self-worship), yet the plot still hinges on the conflict between Good vs. Evil in which the two are co-equal powers, and what Christians regard as evil (e.g. daemons) the author portrays as helpful and necessary, in his attempt to subvert the concepts altogether in the minds of his readers. Daniel Moloney doesn't caution parents because the alternative Pullman upholds is not that compelling, but I think Moloney underestimates how profoundly un-catechised children (society) really have become in basic Christian precepts.

Utter blather. Give your children Tolkien for Christmas instead. And watch a good movie.