Look, I'm not Terry Eagleton's official press agent or something. Read the book and make up your own mind. One of Eagleton's core presumptions, an article of faith if you like, is that ideas can be provocative and useful even if you don't swallow them whole.

But in short, yes, there is *incontestably* a long theological tradition -- you might call it "liberal" Christianity, although Eagleton specifically avoids that word, calling it scriptural and orthodox -- which does not hold any of those six propositions enumerated. This is a venerable tradition, not one invented in recent decades by guitar-strumming nuns. He didn't make it up and neither did I. This is precisely where Eagleton says Dawkins etc. misunderstand theology.

Of course there are plenty of Christians these days who hold a more literal-minded view, but in historical terms it is fundamentalism that is a recent aberration. One hundred and fifty years ago a vanishingly small number of Christians would have tried to tell you that the Bible was literally word-for-word true; it was variously understood as a mixture of history, eyewitness or post-eyewitness accounts, moral fables and parables and outright myth, albeit divinely inspired. William Jennings Bryan, although claimed by today's fundamentalists, was not a fundamentalist as we mean that term now. (He clearly did not believe in a six-day creation, 6000 years ago.) The Mormon church, for God's sake, did not begin to preach that the Bible was literally true until very recently, in an evident effort to get on board the Christian right's love train.

So the thing is, you don't get to cite the Bible as your authority when discussing this liberal-orthodox theological tradition, which is both Catholic and Protestant and goes back to at least the 16th century (as mentioned by one poster) and to some extent all the way to Augustine. You just don't. Indeed, there are specific truth claims Christians may make that you may find ludicrous or implausible, and some of them may be found in the Bible. Fine, OK. You can say the whole thing is just more or less sophisticated grades of hokum, and that's fine too. But it's no good saying, they have to take all of it as true or they're not really Christians. That's exactly what the fundamentalists say, as a matter of fact.

As for the observation that Eagleton comes pretty close to being an atheist himself, bingo. Or rather, duh -- he's a Marxist. As for the fact that his disagreement with Dawkins is ultimately more political than theological, that was made perfectly clear in my piece. (That doesn't mean that E. thinks D. has any substantive understanding of theology, only that he is right that very often religion has been socially destructive and that it has no relevance to science.)

My sense is that some people got so steamed up, perhaps by the provocative headline, that they made no effort to follow the argument to its end. Eagleton is finally interested in the value and importance of Jesus Christ as a transcendent signifier, and not terribly interested in questions that are indeed crucial to believing Christians, such as whether he rose from the dead, or was simultaneously human & divine.

Hey, to the reader who asked about Blu-rays, you're absolutely right. I haven't made the jump myself -- I know, an awful admission -- but with Criterion's Blu-ray of "The Seventh Seal" on the way, I might have to. But yes, I should make clear when these are available on BD. Most releases are, these days, but far from all.

@assezmalicieuse (that username is still a fave), maybe I shouldn't bring this up, but I actually *did* review the Criterion DVD of Pasolini's Salo last year! I think I was pretty clear that you shouldn't watch it unless you're *that sort* of person.

www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/feature/2008/10/08/salo/

As for the reader who's determined to call me names, you know, sticks and stones, almost anything's fair game on the Internet, etc. It doesn't bother me, because the person has made no effort to look at my track record and has concocted a ludicrous caricature of who I am and what I like. S/he also has failed to grasp the alleged point of this column -- I am not supposed to review mainstream DVDs, for the love of Mike! -- and is determined to feel insulted or condescended to based on my tone and my perhaps weak efforts to crack jokes at my own expense. Nothing I can do about that, and it's not worth responding to.

What bemuses me is the thing a couple of posters have mentioned: Who or what is being hurt when we pay a little attention to cultural work that is inherently not popular and that constitutes a tiny slice of the entertainment industry, instead of paying obeisance 100 percent of the time to Hollywood movies and network TV?

Without even getting into the whole question of what popular taste signifies -- and how to understand the impulse that makes people dislike things they have never tried -- I can't see why the success of things that a mass audience enjoys is in any way endangered by those who (sometimes) like something else more.

Is the mainstream entertainment industry like the Old Testament God? It's going to get pissed and rain fire upon us if we don't all worship it all the time? I mean, I'm sure Jeff Katzenberg and Scott Rudin and the producers of American Idol are totally crushed that I wrote something about Bunuel and Visconti today. It's a scandal the way that nobody pays attention to their stuff.

Oh, and the last time I scoured the discount bins at Target I came up with The Man From Snowy River (decent Aussie western for rainy-summer-day viewing) and The Secret of Roan Inish, which might be my favorite John Sayles movie. Can't wait to show that one to my kids.