nnozomi

 So I have actually been the one in charge of the religion elective for seniors at school this year, on account of I'm the one who suggested it. This was the first year we had either seniors or electives, so it was all very experimental; in the spring we had some guest speakers, and in the fall it was me and four kids--an easily confused but likeable devout Baptist, two young budding atheists/feminists, and a dryly reserved artist of, as they say, no party or clique. We had some good discussions, and the kids became somewhat more informed about the basics of world religions than most high school seniors around here. Come the end of term this month they wanted to watch "a religious movie," and the closest approximation I could find in the video store was this thing with Orlando Bloom called "Kingdom of Heaven." I'm not a movie-goer, to put it mildly, and didn't know from it, but it turned out to be a sort of action-movie crossed with historical-religious heavy stuff. Crusaders, Jerusalem, Saladin. Not very interesting as by me, but not a bad starting point for discussion. The kids had been doing the Crusades in history class and understood the background, and got the idea of what the filmmakers were trying to do with their rather heavy-handed hints about Christians and Muslims making peace etc. etc. (I'm all in favor, just the way the movie did it was so obvious.) 
I was interested to find it not entirely unrelated to things we've talked about before in their experience as Korean-Japanese, too. One of the kids asked why there were lots of Christians and Muslims around Jerusalem but no Jews to speak of, and I, um, guessed (my medieval history is pretty much limited to Eleanor of Aquitaine and Richard III) that it was the Diaspora, which is a word they know well. It also occurred to me, watching the movie, that it was very strange to have all these white European Christians setting up manors in Palestine and ruling over the local Muslims. What do you call that? I asked the kids, and D my artist said in his usual throwaway style "Colonialism." Damn straight.
Eventually the conversation turned to the Muslim conception of heaven, all those beautiful virgins, and B the Baptist just couldn't get the idea--for some reason he kept repeating "And so at your funeral you have these seventy-three beautiful women, or...?!" "Not at your funeral," I began, trying valiantly to keep a straight face, and P and W the girls (giggling outright) kept correcting him "No, it's seventy-two!" He just couldn't let go of that one extra lady.