My Comments On Daniel

I don’t have any; we don’t watch TV, so I didn’t see it (and from what I hear, I’m just as happy not to have cause to ask for my hour back). I’d be surprised if I haven’t learned all I need to from Todd, Jane, the Salty Vicar (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11) and Titusonenine. If I had extra time on my hands, I’d follow the link to the Diocese of Washington blog — but I don’t.

Short answer: I’m among the least-connected Episcopal clergy around, but I’m not aware of any congregation with so great a concentration of issues. I grieve at the doctrinal and ethical tone-deafness of the show (and many commenters thereupon). It’s not being “honest” about the church; it’s representing Hollywood’s imagination of itself in clerical dress, and supposing that that’s what the church must be like (as far as I can tell from incoming reports).

5 thoughts on “My Comments On Daniel

  1. I was just awfully relieved to see that it wasn’t about the actual, biblical Book of Daniel. Teaching a seminar on that book is already difficult enough, thank you.

    The more thought I gave to the Jesus character, the more I began to conclude that that element could not possibly be done to my satisfaction, so I dropped it. I will say this: you can’t take a Jesus dressed in robes, plunk him down in the North American suburbs, and not have the effect be vaguely sketch-comedy-ish.

  2. It was TWO hours, two hours I’ll never get back, two hours I’ll have to live with.

    The worst thing about it was that I’ll have to keep watching, if only so that I explain to others who have seen it why the church I know and love bears little to no resemblance to what’s depicted therein.

    I mean, aaaaaagh. Another delightful notion of what it means to be a priest (or a Bishop, don’t even get me started on the Bishop!) in the Episcopal church.

    Feh. They are trying for the Desperate Housewives audience. Except at least Desperate Housewives is reasonably well-written and not in the least pretentious.

  3. “you can’t take a Jesus dressed in robes, plunk him down in the North American suburbs, and not have the effect be vaguely sketch-comedy-ish.”

    Well, I don’t know. I think it was 2000 that ‘What’s Your Name’ was getting some press in Pennsylvania. I followed the news until one day he simply walked out of town. Folks spot him walking beside the highway from time to time, I read one report that spotting him walking barefoot in the dead of winter along the snow-covered highway in PA. An interesting fellow who is spreading the Gospel in a way that should make us pause at our own timorous ways.

    http://www.people.vcu.edu/~dbromley/nomad.htm

  4. From the Reba side of Evanston:
    I’m not sure how I got roped into watching it two nights ago–I don’t know anything about TV or that show–but I’m fairly sure I could spend the rest of my life writing about what was wrong with it. The problem is, I’m still wide-eyed and tongue-tied in disbelief about what I watched for two hours. Yikes.

  5. You should check out this link about the show.

    link

    “What’s delightful about my character is partly his struggles and his flaws,” says Quinn. “He’s not extremely spiritually evolved, and I think that is his journey. He lives in this whirlwind of craziness of having three kids and this ‘disease of busy-ness’ that the modern world seems to [suffer from]. Daniel is a decent man who has the desire to evolve spiritually, but he has miles to go before he sleeps.”

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