PZ's Picks - S&H Nov/Dec 2004

I often wonder how Rod Serling would have handled the new Holocaust-consciousness. He touches directly on it, for example, in his Twilight Zone episodes, "Death’s Head Revisited," and in his harrowing episode, "Escape Route" in the movie Night Gallery. But Christianity gets in there, too, and the narration always universalizes the theme of "man’s inhumanity to man."

So I wonder: Would Serling, the inspired, have narrowed his focus, as Philip Roth continually seems to do, on the plight of the Jews as such; or would he have kept his viewfinder open on the universality (i.e., the banality) of human sin? We cannot know (Serling died in 1975). In the meantime, go out and rent the DVD or video of "Escape Route," "I am the Night — Color Me Black" (Dean’s Prize if you recognize the star!), "The Gift," "A Passage for Trumpet," "Night of the Meek," "A Quality of Mercy," or "In Praise of Pip," all Twilight Zone episodes; or the Night Gallery segment, "The Messiah on Mott Street." You will observe a sensitivity at work which can only be called, in a now politically incorrect phrase, "Judeo-Christian."

Incidentally, Serling was ethnically Jewish, a practicing Unitarian — every Sunday — but also an admirer of Christ.

On another note, check out the new books that have appeared from George Sumner, Grant LeMarquand and Gerhard Forde, not to mention Ashley Null’s amazing new book for athletes. Trinity’s bookstore can get them all for you.