(RNS) The new “Noah” movie has everything you’d expect in a biblical blockbuster.
Big Hollywood stars. Extravagant special effects. An apocalyptic flood. There’s even a few rock monsters for good measure.
But the Rev. Wil Gafney sees something missing: a hint of ethnic diversity.
“In this version of Noah, black people do not exist,” she said.
While much of the conversation about the “Noah” film has focused on theology and the degree to which it strays from the biblical text, few people seem to notice the all-white cast, said Gafney, an Episcopal priest and associate professor of Hebrew and Old Testament at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.
That’s worrisome, she said, especially at a time when the United States is becoming more and more multiethic.
“I hoped that at least there would be some beige people in the movie,” she said. “But there was no one visibly of color.”
Add to that the so-called “Curse of Ham,” a troubling Bible passage from Genesis. It tells how Noah settled down after the flood and planted a vineyard. One night he got drunk and his son Ham saw him naked, a taboo in the ancient world.
Noah curses his son Ham, and Ham’s descendants, including his son Canaan. That Bible passage, also known as the “Curse of Canaan,” was originally understood to justify the subjection of the Canaanites to the Israelites. In later centuries, the narrative was interpreted as an explanation for black skin, and in the United States, as a biblical justification for slavery. White Christian slaveholders argued that Africans were descendants of Ham, and therefore cursed by God.
The new film strays from the Genesis account of the confrontation between Ham and Noah, said Gafney, so there’s no curse.
Instead, she said, the movie simply erases people of color from the story.
Efrem Smith, president of Los Angeles-based World Impact, a Christian nonprofit, and author of “The Post-Black and Post-White Church,” sees “Noah” as part of a pattern.
In the past, biblical epics such as the 1956 classic “The Ten Commandments” featured white actors playing Moses and Pharaoh. Smith said that he’d hoped for something more authentic in this movie.
“When it come to films on Bible stories and biblical figures, we are going back to the days of Charlton Heston,” he said.
Smith said he respects pastors that encourage people to see the film. But he wished they’d been a bit more critical of it, especially on the issue of race.
The Bible, he said, is the most multicultural piece of literature that most people will ever read. So a film about the Bible should reflect that diversity, he said.
But recent films about Bible characters, such as “Noah,” “Son of God,” and a planned version of the Exodus story starring Christian Bale, star white actors in leading roles.
Smith finds that disappointing.
“We need sensitivity from our evangelical brothers and sisters about how white images of Bible figures have impacted people of color in the past,” he said. “We are too comfortable with a white biblical narrative.”
Nashville, Tenn.-based writer and speaker Trillia Newbell, author of “United: Captured by God’s Vision for Diversity,” also was concerned about the lack of diversity in “Noah.”
Seeing Jesus or Noah or other biblical characters portrayed by white actors has consequences.
“It shapes how you read the Bible,” she said. “Every time you pick up the Bible, those are the images you see.”
The Rev. Enoch Fuzz of Corinthian Missionary Baptist Church in Nashville, said too many Christians don’t pay attention when it comes to diversity. It’s like a blind spot, he said.
“We want heaven to be a place of diversity — and then we don’t see it when it is missing here on earth,” said Fuzz.
Some of his pastor friends had encouraged him to see “Noah,” in hopes of getting people to talk about the Bible. But he’d decided to skip it, because of the lack of diversity in the cast.
Anthea Butler, a blogger and associate professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, said the filmmakers seemed to treat the story of Noah more like a science fiction story such as “The Lord of the Rings” than a retelling of a biblical tale.
That may explain why the cast doesn’t fit the movie’s setting in the Middle East, she said.
But their casting decisions send a troubling message, she said.
“It’s a world where only white people get saved,” Butler said. “This doesn’t look like the world that God created.”
Butler suspects that filmmakers may have made a major marketing error.
A new report from the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture found that African-Americans are the most likely to read the Bible. So they care about Bible stories and may be turned off by this new “Noah” movie.
“Black women carry their Bibles around and read them all the time,” she said. “And they cannot see themselves in this movie.”
She had some advice for Hollywood producers looking for the next biblical blockbuster.
“If someone wants to make a ton of money right now, they should go out and remake ‘The Queen of Sheba.’”
Why do democracies keep lurching from success to failure? The current financial crisis is just the latest example of how things continue to go wrong, just when it looked like they were going right. In this wide-ranging, original, and compelling book, David Runciman tells the story of modern democracy through the history of moments of crisis, from the First World War to the economic crash of 2008.
David Runciman is professor of politics at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Trinity Hall. His books include The Politics of Good Intentions and Political Hypocrisy (both Princeton). He writes regularly about politics for the London Review of Books.
Four years after his #1 bestseller The Big Short, Michael Lewis returns to Wall Street to report on a high-tech predator stalking the equity markets.
Michael Lewis, the author of Boomerang, Liar’s Poker, The New New Thing, Moneyball, The Blind Side, Panic, Home Game and The Big Short, among other works, lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Tabitha Soren, and their three children. 
A generation ago, “cyberspace” was just a term from science fiction, used to describe the nascent network of computers linking a few university labs. Today, our entire modern way of life, from communication to commerce to conflict, fundamentally depends on the Internet. And the cybersecurity issues that result challenge literally everyone: politicians wrestling with everything from cybercrime to online freedom; generals protecting the nation from new forms of attack, while planning new cyberwars; business executives defending firms from once unimaginable threats, and looking to make money off of them; lawyers and ethicists building new frameworks for right and wrong. Most of all, cybersecurity issues affect us as individuals. We face new questions in everything from our rights and responsibilities as citizens of both the online and real world to simply how to protect ourselves and our families from a new type of danger. And yet, there is perhaps no issue that has grown so important, so quickly, and that touches so many, that remains so poorly understood.
Wall Street Journal Bestseller
STEVEN KOTLER is a New York Times bestselling author, award-winning journalist, and co-founder and director of research for the Flow Genome Project. His books include the non-fiction works “The Rise of Superman,” “Abundance,” “A Small Furry Prayer” “West of Jesus,” and the novel “The Angle Quickest for Flight.” His work has been translated into more than 30 languages. His articles have appeared in over 60 publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Wired, GQ, Outside, Popular Science, Men’s Journal and Discover. He also writes “Far Frontiers,” a blog about technology and innovation for Forbes.com and “The Playing Field,” a blog about the science of sport and culture for PsychologyToday.com. He lives in New Mexico with his wife, the author Joy Nicholson.
If you think that surviving an airplane crash will get you a free pass for the rest of your life, think again. When young Annette Herfkens, one of the few female international bond traders on Wall Street and her fiancé boarded Vietnam Airlines flight 474 in Ho Chi Minh City, they were just two passengers headed for a romantic getaway, unaware of the fateful moment that would shatter their dreams forever.
THEORY: Plane ‘Hid’ Behind Other Flight into Central Asia 
America’s most prominent legal mind and the #1 bestselling author of Chutzpah and The Best Defense, Alan Dershowitz, recounts his legal autobiography, describing how he came to the law, as well as the cases that have changed American jurisprudence over the past 50 years, most of which he has personally been involved in.
Michael Levi is the David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow and Director of the Program on Energy Security and Climate Change at Council on Foreign Relations. An expert on the global politics and economics of energy, resources, and the environment, his most recent book was The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America’s Future.
Overview
Erik Brynjolfsson is the Schussel Family Professor at the MIT Sloan School, the Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research and teaching examine the effects of information technologies on business strategy, productivity and employment. His recent work studies data-driven decision-making and the role intangible assets. Brynjolfsson is a director or advisor for several technology-intensive firms and lectures worldwide on technology and strategy. His work has been recognized with 10 Best Paper prizes and five patents. He received his A.B. and S.M. degrees from Harvard and his Ph.D. from MIT.
Journalist and best-selling author Linda McQuaig has developed a reputation for challenging the establishment.
Neil Brooks is director of the Graduate Program in Taxation at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto. He has published extensively on income tax issues and has been a consultant on tax policy and reform issues to numerous governments around the world.
The United States is more vulnerable today than ever before-including during the Great Depression and the Civil War-because the pillars of democracy that once supported a booming middle class have been corrupted, and without them, America teeters on the verge of the next Great Crash.
Thom Hartmann is the four-time Project Censored Award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of 23 books currently in print in over a dozen languages on five continents. Hartmann is also an internationally known speaker on culture and communications, an author, and an innovator in the fields of psychiatry, ecology, and economics.
The past five years have held tremendous significance for the process of nation building in Malaysia. Civil society and voters, especially in urban areas, are making new and strong demands on the government, in fact on governance per se; the opposition parties that managed to pull off successful electoral upsets in 2008 have formed a viable coalition to challenge the long-term federal government; and the federal government itself has been trying to adopt a reformist image without alienating its numerous conservative supporters. Although the government’s slogan of 1Malaysia was meant to signify national unity, it lacked credibility because many of the systemic deficiencies of sustained one party – 1Party – rule still remained. This collection of articles studies various aspects of change now pushed into the foreground for discussion. 
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2. Trained as an attorney in Iran, Dr. Shirin Ebadi set up a private practice in 1992 handling contentious cases. She was the defense lawyer for many controversial political and human rights cases in Iran, including Parvaneh and Dariush Foroohar (well-known political activists killed by security forces) and Zahra Bani Yaghoob (a young doctor killed in detention). These activities led to her incarceration on charges of spreading and publishing lies against the Islamic Republic. She spent 25 days in solitary confinement. But the international community recognized her work and awarded Dr. Ebadi the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. Dr. Ebadi used some of the prize money to set up an office for the Center for Defenders of Human Rights and support the families of political prisoners. Although a role model to many, Dr Ebadi says she is “opposed to following a role model. I often tell my daughters not to follow me as a role model. I have not followed any role models. I tell young women, in particular, that you need to be yourself and follow your own dreams. I tell them to make efforts to reach their goals and not fear the possibility of failure.”
3. Maria Bashir is the first female Prosecutor General in Afghanistan. In her groundbreaking role, she has taken on the mission of educating and empowering the women in her community of Herat of their Islamic and civic rights. The knowledge Bashir is imparting is empowering women to file police reports and claim their rights to safety and equal treatment. The sad irony is that while Bashir protects women and children, her own life is under threat from both the local government and the Taliban. Bashir has sent her children out of the country to keep them safe while she herself moves from safe house to safe house. For her brave work, the United States Department of State presented her The International Women of Courage Award, which is awarded annually to women around the world who have shown leadership, courage, resourcefulness and willingness to sacrifice for others, especially for better promotion of women’s rights. She says, “The message that I give to young girls is that there is no career that they cannot do as long as they are equipped with the knowledge. I also make them aware of their rights, and I tell them that if they work in the government of Afghanistan, they can have a significant role in rule of law, and specifically justice for women. I believe it so important to lead society toward justice!”
4. Fahima Hashim is the director of Salamah Women’s Resource Center in Sudan, whose most successful campaign has been to reform laws on rape that, in their current form, prevent the survivors of sexual violence from accessing justice. Sudanese laws currently grant conditional immunity to officials, especially police and security forces, many of whom have been accused of rape. The initiative would also end the use of rape as a weapon of war in Darfur. Since launching this initiative, rape cases and child sexual abuses are now covered in the daily newspapers and the government is allying with civil society to reform rape law, thereby protecting women and children. She says her “country is experiencing an identity crisis, especially after the separation of South Sudan. Some are trying to understand, and some will migrate. Salamah works with a big number of university gradates and university students, and they give me hope that change will come and new men are walking together with women, equally.” 
5. Laila Shawa was born in 1940 to one of Gaza’s old landowning families. She took up residence in London in 1987 and soon after started her socio-political critique Women And The Veil, resulting in acclaimed paintings like The Impossible Dream. Shawa’s pioneering work during the 1980s of utilizing photography as integral to art production has left a lasting mark on contemporary Palestinian art. For the artist, it signified a departure from the traditional paint medium and instigated such works as the controversial installation Crucifixion 2000: In the Name of God at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. In January 2009, in response to the invasion of Gaza by Israel and the high death toll among children, she created a Gaza III series. Another powerful series titled Cast Lead references the high number of children killed in the airstrike operation by the Israeli air force, also called Cast Lead. In Shawa’s powerful work, the political is often the personal. When asked about her courage, she says, “I come from a long line of strong women. My grandmothers were very powerful; my mother was a follower of Simon De Beauvoir. I grew up as an equal, and always believed in the power (and to some extent the supremacy) of women. Watching women subdued — but above all, seeing women accept it — is something I could not accept.”
6. Born in Afghanistan, Dr. Sakena Yacoobi grew up seeing widows forced to beg for money or work for just a little food. She saw women and children who could not read and the impact poverty was having on her country: there were no clinics, no schools, no way for people to learn skills that would better their lives. To change that, Dr. Yacoobi founded Afghan Learning Institute (AIL) to bring education and work training to women and girls. In 1995, the organization began by helping in refugee camps then soon supported secret homeschools inside Afghanistan. After the fall of the Taliban, AIL established learning centers where people can come to get an education and the skills they need to have a better life. For her incredible devotion to promoting education and heath services, Dr. Yacoobi was awarded the 2013 Opus Prize, which comes with a $1 million award. Dr. Yacoobi says she feels optimistic about the future: “I see a future in Afghanistan where women and men work together as equals, where no one’s human rights are abused, where there is harmony and justice for all. Already there are communities of men and women where this is happening. I pray, in the future, those will be the only communities in Afghanistan.”
7. Human Rights lawyer 
8. Tamsila Tauqir is the founder of the Safra Project, a group that works to empower Muslim lesbian, bisexual and trans. Located in the UK, Safra Project has three key aims: to empower Muslim lesbian, bisexual and trans (Muslim LBT) women to deal with the issues they face resulting from their sexual orientation and/or gender identity within the context of their ethnic, cultural and religious background; to raise awareness on the needs of and issues relating to Muslim LBT women in order to make service provision accessible and appropriate; and to eliminate prejudice and discrimination experienced by Muslim LBT women and to promote diversity. Safra comes from the Arabic word Safr, meaning to journey or travel. The organization chose this name because their mission is to support women on their journey. Asked about a recent success story, Tauqir told me about a British woman who wanted to bring her partner over from Pakistan on a fiancé visa. She says, “It took just under a year of evidence gathering, writing letters to the Home Office and UK Border Agency, involving the local Member of Parliament, seeking appropriate legal advice but it happened. Just a few months ago the partner came over to the UK and recently the two women had a small civil partnership ceremony to legalize their commitment… Now plans are being made for the shaadi (wedding), with all the glitz and glamour you can imagine of a Bollywood movie… And Safra Project will be there to share their joyous day, inshallah.”
10. Boushra Almutawakel has worked as a photographer for the United Nations, CARE International, the Royal Netherlands Embassy, the Social Organization for Family Development, the National Institute for Health Education, The British Council, The French Embassy, among other others, while pursuing her own personal photographic projects. In 1999, she was honored as the first Yemeni Woman Photographer by the Empirical Research and Women’s Studies Centre at Sana’a University. She is a founding member of Al-Halaqa in Sana’a, an artists’ group that created a space for discourse and exhibitions and forged links with international artists. Among other places, her work has been acquired by the British Museum in London, The Museum of Fine Arts of Boston and the Barjeel Foundation. Her “Hijab Series” was inspired after 9/11 when women wearing the veil were commonly portrayed in the media as weak, oppressed, and backwards. Almutawakel says she wanted to portray the hijab “as a form of self-expression… I want to explore the many faces and facets of the veil based on my own personal experiences and observations: the convenience, freedom, strength, power, liberation, limitations, danger, humor, irony, variety, cultural, social, and religious aspects, as well as the beauty, mystery, and protection.”
THE SECRET SERVICE. An elite team of men who share a single mission: to protect the president of the United States. On November 22, 1963, these men failed—and a country would never be the same. Now, for the first time, a member of JFK’s Secret Service detail reveals the inside story of the assassination, the weeks and days that led to it and its heartrending aftermath. This extraordinary book is a moving, intimate portrait of dedication, courage, and loss. 
As we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the U.N. proclamation of Human Rights and celebrate the life of human rights champion Nelson Mandela, I cannot help but reflect on the core values of human rights as revealed in Islam 1,435 years ago.
In Days of Fire, Peter Baker, Chief White House Correspondent for The New York Times, takes us on a gripping and intimate journey through the eight years of the Bush and Cheney administration in a tour-de-force narrative of a dramatic and controversial presidency.
IF YOU HAD THE RESOURCES TO ACCOMPLISH SOMETHING GREAT IN THE WORLD, WHAT WOULD YOU DO?
The New York Times bestseller: “Historically incisive, geographically broad-reaching, and brimming with illuminating anecdotes.”—Max Rodenbeck, New York Review of Books
Nelson Mandela: By Himself is the definitive book of quotations from one of the great leaders of our time. This collection – gathered from privileged authorised access to Mandela’s vast personal archive of private papers, speeches, correspondence and audio recordings – features nearly 2,000 quotations spanning over 60 years, many previously unpublished.
Malcolm Gladwell, the #1 bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What the Dog Saw, offers his most provocative—and dazzling—book yet.
Psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman, author of the #1 international bestseller Emotional Intelligence, offers a groundbreaking look at today’s scarcest resource and the secret to high performance and fulfillment: attention.
The Higher Reality of Business
For fifty years the truth about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has been obscured. This book releases us from a crippling distortion of American history.
Vincent Bugliosi, prosecutor of Charles Manson, lives in Los Angeles, California. He is the author or co-author of many books, among them the #1 best-sellers Helter Skelter, And the Sea Will Tell, and Outrage; plus Four Days in November, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, No Island of Sanity, The Betrayal of America, Lullaby and Good Night, Shadow Of Cain, Till Death Us Do Part, Drugs in America, and The Phoenix Solution.
In a handful of nations, virtually all children are learning to make complex arguments and solve problems they’ve never seen before. They are learning to think, in other words. What is it like to be a child in these new education superpowers?
Amanda Ripley is an investigative journalist for Time, The Atlantic and other magazines. She is the author, most recently, of THE SMARTEST KIDS IN THE WORLD–and How They Got That Way. Her first book, THE UNTHINKABLE: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes--and Why, was published in 15 countries and turned into a PBS documentary. Her work has helped Time win two National Magazine Awards.
Erol Yayboke is is a Program Manager with the Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD) team at the Center for International Development at Harvard’s Kennedy School and a member of the Board of Directors of the Andi Leadership Institute for Young Women. Before EPoD he served in a variety of development aid management roles in Iraq, South Sudan, Ethiopia and Afghanistan. He holds a Masters in Public Affairs from the University of Texas at Austin and currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 
From Rhonda Byrne, creator of the international bestselling movie and book, The Secret, comes Hero, her latest world-changing project and the most important to date.
Rhonda Byrne began her journey with The Secret film, viewed by millions across the planet. She followed with The Secret book, a global bestseller, available in fifty languages and with over 25 million copies in print worldwide.
