by | Jul 10, 2024 | Uncategorized
Rick Dempsey explains how his decades of localization expertise is being applied to The Chosen.
In 2014, Disney released a video of Elsa singing her hit “Let It Go” in 25 languages. If you didn’t know any better, you might have assumed that Idina Menzel, who sang perhaps the most popular Disney ballad in history, had performed each version.
Significant credit for this House of Mouse magic belongs to Rick Dempsey, who then served as senior vice president of creative for Disney Character Voices International. Dempsey’s team held auditions all over the world, ultimately finding the dozens of singers who brought the music of Frozen alive in their languages.
The goal was “to ensure there is character consistency” and that “the voices are all very similar around the world,” Dempsey said in 2014. “The good news is that we were able to find talent that were able to pull it off.”
This impressive consistency, or “character integrity,” is a concept and practice that The Walt Disney Company embraced and expanded nearly to the point of perfection, thanks to Dempsey’s work. Today, he brings this expertise to The Chosen, the most-translated TV show in history.
CT recently spoke with Dempsey about his transition from Disney, the arduous process of translation and localization, and how The Chosen is connecting with unreached people groups and places where sharing the gospel can cost people their lives.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
Tell us about your 35-year-long career at Disney.
I started with Disney in 1988 and led character voices for the whole company. My job was to protect character integrity, which means that when the movie characters are adapted to connect with local audiences, they remain consistent across the languages. I think it is …
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by | Jul 10, 2024 | Uncategorized
In a case that alluded to the investor’s faith, a federal jury convicted Bill Hwang of market manipulation and defrauding banks.
Supporters of Christian investor and philanthropist Bill Hwang closed their eyes and prayed in federal court as they waited for a verdict on a case accusing him of massive Wall Street fraud. Hwang himself, serene throughout the proceedings, read a Bible devotional and took notes in the margins—a practice he had done throughout the trial—as he awaited the jury’s ruling.
On Wednesday, a jury found Hwang, at one time one of the wealthiest evangelicals in the US, guilty of manipulating the stock market and defrauding banks. It is one of the biggest cases of Wall Street fraud in terms of dollar amount, with banks losing $10 billion after he and his firm lied to them.
It is the crashing conclusion of a unique institution: Hwang’s Archegos Capital Management, a Christian investment firm that was named for a Greek word used to describe Christ as the “author” of our salvation (Heb. 2:10) and the “prince” of life (Acts 3:15). While Hwang’s defense team had argued that his aggressive trading at Archegos was within the bounds of normal Wall Street practice, the jury found he and his team were guilty of defrauding banks of billions and artificially pumping up stock prices.
The jury found him guilty of 10 of 11 counts. He was guilty of racketeering, securities fraud, market manipulation, and wire fraud. He was found not guilty on one count of market manipulation regarding one particular stock.
When Archegos collapsed in March 2021, the firm lost $36 billion, banks lending to Archegos lost $10 billion, and about $100 billion in market value disappeared.
Hwang’s Christian faith was woven into the long federal trial, featuring witnesses from Hwang’s Christian foundation Grace and …
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by | Jul 10, 2024 | Uncategorized
As digital enticements proliferate, Michelangelo and the apostle Paul teach us to seek humbler, faithful art forms.
Why pray alone or with your family if you can pray with big-biceped celebrities on the Hallow app? Why limit yourself to reading or hearing the Gospels if you can have a Jesus with all the thrill and appeal of a bingeable Netflix series? Why cultivate the Ignatian prayer skill of active imagination when you can passively experience an immersive exhibit that brings a storm on the Sea of Galilee to life?
Why be satisfied with an ordinary church when you can digitally tour Europe’s greatest cathedrals or listen to famous preachers comfortably at home? Or why settle for traditional depictions of Jesus or figures from the Bible and church history when images of what The Atlantic dubbed “hot AI Jesus” and hot AI saints now proliferate online?
These are but some of the questions posed by our digital era’s dizzying accelerations, and Christians best have an answer. Here, I’ll focus on the artificial intelligence renderings of Jesus and explore how the example of history’s greatest Christian artist, Michelangelo, can help us resist the enticements of artificial devotion.
The easiest response to AI Jesus is to say that the iconoclasts—the Christian icon-breakers who warned against or outright destroyed devotional images in eighth-century Byzantium and sixteenth-century Europe—have been vindicated at last. An AI-generated image like shrimp Jesus is surely enough to cause some to hope that a modern equivalent of Oliver Cromwell’s stained glass–smashing soldiers will soon ride again.
Modern iconoclasts would argue that churches should be clean and imageless, an ever more necessary weekly cleansing of our digitally exhausted visual palette. This is venerable and ancient counsel. …
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by | Jul 9, 2024 | Uncategorized
Evangelicals oppose Donald Trump’s shift to leave abortion policy up to the states.
The new Republican National Convention platform endorsed by Donald Trump is missing the strong pro-life stance evangelicals have come to expect from the GOP.
Instead of calling for a concerted national push to curtail abortion, as the official party platform has done for the past 40 years, the new document removes that language and deems the matter best left to individual states to decide.
Even evangelical leaders who had been split over Trump have joined together in a chorus of criticism and disappointment.
“A moment when the abortion industry has been knocked on its heels is no time to shrink from a full-throated commitment to protecting preborn lives,” Brent Leatherwood, president of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC)’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, told Politico.
He wrote for Religion News Service that Republicans’ actions suggest they see abortion as “too politically fraught and prefer to run from a defense of the sanctity of life altogether.”
Clint Pressley, a North Carolina megachurch pastor who has recently been elected SBC president, wrote on social media that he is “disheartened” by national Republicans.
“The GOP platform may be subject to change, but God’s word is not,” he said. “Southern Baptists ‘contend for the sanctity of all human life from conception to natural death’ and will insist that elected officials do the same.”
The change in the proposed Republican platform reflects a shift toward Trump’s stance on the issue. He’s carved out a middle-of-the-road approach while on the campaign trail, saying the issue should be left to the discretion of the states. During the recent …
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by | Jul 9, 2024 | Uncategorized
Heart surgeon Masoud Pezeshkian takes the helm of the Islamic Republic, having campaigned for ethnic and religious minorities while pledging to reach out to the West.
The surprise election in Iran of the sole reformist candidate for president was met with an unsurprising reaction from the United States.
Heart surgeon Masoud Pezeshkian tallied 53 percent of the vote for a clear but narrow victory over hard-line former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili in an electoral process the State Department labeled “not free or fair.”
It followed the May 19 death of the previous president in a helicopter crash.
With “no expectation [of] fundamental change,” the perspective from Washington echoed that of Javaid Rehman, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Iran. The Pakistani-British lawyer stated that a new president is unlikely to improve the Islamic Republic’s record.
Iranian Christian sources in the diaspora agree.
“The result highlights a superficial change in leadership,” said Robert Karami, an Iranian Church of England pastor outside London and a board member of Release International, a UK-based advocate for the persecuted church. “It does not matter who holds the presidential office as long as the Supreme Leader remains in power.”
Pezeshkian, age 69, was one of six candidates permitted to run by Iran’s 12-member Guardian Council, appointed by head of state Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Dozens of candidates were disqualified, including former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Analysts speculated the inclusion of Pezeshkian was intended to increase voter turnout—but if so, the strategy initially failed and may have backfired.
Only 40 percent of the electorate participated in the first round held on June 28, the lowest tally since the 1979 Iranian revolution. It resulted in the first runoff since 2005, leading …
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