(Note: This entry has nothing to do with that leopard love story, Honore de Balzac’s A Passion in the Desert.)

Interesting report from Country Keepers about The Passion making a significant splash in Qatar and Kuwait, generating among Muslims an interest in Jesus and Scripture. Ironically, interest in the film was piqued by word of its supposed anti-Semitic content. Just as ironic is the film’s propagation via the spread of “sinful” pirated DVDs.

TPOTC has also made a timely Holy Week premiere in the Philippines, where I think it has been well-received. Filipinos are mostly Roman Catholic, after all, and are also less likely to be offended by scenes of gore and violence, being a people more jaded to such things than an American audience. (Especially with those bloody penitentias literally flagellating themselves down provincial roads and nailing themselves to crosses. More on that some other time.) For an excellent POV on TPOTC from a Filipino Catholic philosophy professor at a Jesuit university, here’s the review from Rowie.

Meanwhile, here in the USA, they’re whipping Easter bunnies. The horror, the horror.