Word: aslan
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...hovering over the first film adaptations of two best-selling fantasy series for children, C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. Lewis' series of seven books, published in the 1950s, was widely seen as a Christian allegory, presided over by the God-lion Aslan, who dies and rises again. Pullman's trilogy, written in the 1990s, described a battle between a dictatorial deity and the rebel angels determined to defeat him. As the author told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2003, "My books are about killing...
When J.K. Rowling said at Carnegie Hall that Albus Dumbledore--her Aslan, her Gandalf, her Yoda--was gay, the crowd apparently sat in silence for a few seconds and then burst into wild applause. I'm still sitting in silence. I feel a bit like I did when we learned too much about Mark Foley and Larry Craig: you are not the role model I'd hoped...
...devil. There are also no immortal, all-wise elves, as in Tolkien, nor are there any mystical Maiar, which is what Gandalf was (what, you thought he was human? Genealogically speaking, he's closer to a balrog than he is to a man.) There is certainly no benevolent, paternal Aslan to turn up late in the book and fight the Big Bad. The essential problem in Rowling's books is how to love in the face of death, and her characters must arrive at the solution all on their own, hand-to-hand, at street level, with bleeding knuckles...
...Indeed, just several days after the Beslan tragedy, Akhmed Zakayev, then the Chechens' chief rebel envoy in London, told TIME in a phone interview that on September 2, then rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov (killed by the Russian forces in March, 200 5) gave him orders to do everything possible to save the children." Zakayev said they both "were horrified at this atrocity." Though Maskhadov and Zakayev were not part of the faction that initiated the school operation, they wielded sufficient authority and moral weight to order them to release the hostages in exchange for their safe passage...
...select Linus Torvalds, who invented Linux, the Web's ubiquitous operating system; Bart Ehrman, the biblical scholar who wrote Misquoting Jesus, a book on how biblical texts, through error or intent, changed over the past 2,000 years; and Reza Aslan, who wrote No God but God, a book about what's really going on with Islam and the West, debunking the "clash of civilizations" argument...