A Guide to the Passion Continues to Rocket into the Publishing Stratosphere!

Last I heard, we'd had 310,000 copies requested with no letup in sight. Oodles of people are buying the copies I've go to sell (you can join the oodle here). And meanwhile A Guide to the Passion has received an imprimatur from Bishop Brom of San Diego as well as now being available internationally.

If your parish wants to order bulk quantities for ridiculously cheap, go to www.evangelization.com.

Oh, and I had fun Thursday night. Got to go to the studios of KBLE here in Seattle and do a 15 minute interview about the Guide.

I'm waiting for some sign of "I guess I was wrong" from the experts who assured us that a) the film would be a bomb and b) the streets would be piled hip deep with Jewish corpses from the frenzied mobs of Christians boiling out of theatres thirsting for the blood of the children of Israel.

Somebody should compile a book of failed prophecies. It would be entertaining reading.

Not that there hasn't been a pogrom. Anti-semitism abounds--in the Islamosphere. And in the face of that, some studio heads have trained their irrational hatred--on Mel Gibson.

Sin makes you stupid.

"Sin? Not liking a movie is sin?" No. Not liking a movie is a matter of taste. I know any number of people who dislike this and other movies I like for reasons of taste. None of them believe that my liking of this and other movies is an excuse to repeatedly, publicly and without the slightest bit of evidence declare that just under the skin of millions of their neighbors lies a butcher eager to slaughter innocent people in a pogrom. And none of them would, I daresay, endorse an unspoken blacklist of Mel Gibson simply for making a film they dislike. But, as the NY Times has made clear, some in Hollywood have opted for precisely this irrational bigotry and McCarthyism despite the fact that there is less evidence of Christian anti-semitism among the makers and viewers of this film than there was of communism among those blacklisted in the 50s. To focus all this paranoia on the dreaded Religious Right while completely overlooking and excusing the utter looney Jew-hatred emanating from thousands of mosques is a kind of stupidity that I can only account for as a sort of willed spiritual blindness. Nobody is born that stupid. It takes years of training in some sort of loopy ideology that hates Christianity (and, I might add, Judaism) more than it cares about life. Very, very weird.