Articles For Navigating The Golden Compass

I wrote about the upcoming film adaptation of The Golden Compass last week. You can send the post as an e-mail by clicking here.

Since then, I've found some helpful articles that reinforce some of the things I was saying, as well as providing more details. You'll find the following useful:

In "The Devil's Party," Alan Jacobs wrote, "Whichever party readers support in the ancient contest between God and Satan, they will be disappointed to see how often, in The Amber Spyglass, the tale’s momentum is interrupted by polemic. Pullman’s anti-theistic scolding consorts poorly with his prodigious skills as a storyteller. In imagination and narrative drive, he has few peers among current novelists. For such gifts to be thrust into the service of a reductive and contemptuous ideology is very nearly a tragedy."

In "An Almost Christian Fantasy," Daniel P. Moloney supplies a helpful recap of the three books, and critiques Pullman's effort to set up an alternative to the Christian storyline of Creation, Fall, Sin, Death, and Heaven-Hell.

Albert Mohler has read the books and is one of the first reviewers to see the film. In his briefing, he explains some of the misunderstandings that Pullman has of Christianity--not the least is Pullman's mistaken idea that Original Sin is sexual intercourse. In the end, he says, "Philip Pullman has an agenda, but so do we. Our agenda is the Gospel of Christ -- a message infinitely more powerful than that of The Golden Compass. Pullman's worldview of unrestricted human autonomy would be nightmarish if ever achieved. His story promises liberation but would enslave human beings to themselves and destroy all transcendent value. The biblical story of the Fall is true, after all, and our only rescue is through the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The curse of sin was not reversed by adolescents playing at sex in a garden, but by the Son of God shedding His blood on a cross."

At ChristianityToday.com, film critic Peter Chattaway introduces us to Tony Watkins, author of Dark Matter, a useful book that analyzes the trilogy from a Christian framework. Also, film critic Jeffrey Overstreet provides good answers to some common questions on the film.

Locally, Sara Stevenson wrote in the Statesman that "the anti-Christian message gets in the way of a good story." While reading the trilogy with her book club, she said he enjoyed the first book (The Golden Compass), but as she read the second book she said, "My defense of Pullman thinned." By the third book, "I found myself getting angry with the author because his anti-Church comments began to get in the way of a great story."

And in "How Hollywood Saved God," Hanna Rosin details how the nervous New Line studio has stripped most of Pullman's most subversive themes in order to protect their $180 million investment.