Joan Osborne

I saw The DaVinci Code last night with a friend, a lapsed Catholic, after two other friends, also lapsed Catholics, raved about it. Even a lapsed Jew like me knows that this movie will be poison at the confession box. It's like the idea I discovered in college, that I didn't have to marry a Jew—an idea that did a number on my natal faith.

Again, I'd quarrel with anyone who says this film is antireligious. It's pro-religious. Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou (What's that on her neck?) both seek spiritual knowledge. They want to know who and where the Holy Grail is, and they find out in the transcendent ending. Hanks is a lapsed Catholic but he believes in God. So does Audrey Tautou. It's just that their God is the one that Joan Osborne sang about in the anti-Catholic hit of 8 years back or so: "What if God was one of us?" God is in all of us, we just have to figure out where he/she/it is. The movie's over when Hanks understands that his belief is in This-thing-that-is-larger-than-him-but-also-in-him that he prayed to when he was trying to survive as a little boy in the well, and when Audrey Tautou accepts the blasphemous idea that she's a descendant of Jesus.  read more »

Of all the great writers of American popular song, no one suits our sexually promiscuous but emotion  read more »