A few weeks ago, Pope Francis suggested that atheists could get to heaven on the basis of good deeds alone.

For many people, it was an indication that the Catholic Church was changing its stance and becoming more open and accepting. They were wrong.

The Vatican quickly issued a statement that contradicted the supposedly infallible pope. A spokesman noted that people who are ignorant of the gospels and the church could, indeed, pass through the eye of a needle and enter the kingdom of heaven, like the camel of proverb. Apparently, it’s not their fault if the church’s PR department didn’t find them.

But people with an awareness of the Catholic Church “cannot be saved [if they] refuse to enter her or remain in her,” said the Rev. Thomas Rosica, as quoted by United Press International.

In other words, a person like me, who has turned away from Catholicism and, indeed, all religion, will still roast in perpetual flames, while those who have accepted the gospels and Christ will enjoy the fruits of heaven.

But if I believe all this eternal-life-after-death stuff is bunk anyway, then why do I care what the pope, the cardinals, the bishops or anybody else believes? The truth is, I don’t, not really.

But the pope’s statement was a concession that many roads exist to reach a common destination, which is helpful to many people who have left one faith to join another, but who still are wracked with guilt because of earlier indoctrination. It is also a comfort to the faithful who worry over the souls of atheists in their families. (Hi, Mom.)

Additionally, the pope’s words made me hopeful that we’d moved one tiny step closer to the day when all people could live without the divisiveness of religion, helping one another without the presence of some invisible being who holds out the promise of eternal reward or punishment.

We’re not quite there, but we are advancing. Last August, “The Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism” showed that the number of Americans who identified themselves as religious had dropped from 73 to 60 percent since 2005, while the number of Americans who say they are atheists increased from 1 to 5 percent.

Slow progress, but progress nonetheless.

Whenever I write about religion (much less frequently than my critics believe), I receive a lot of mail. Sometimes readers say they will pray for me, sometimes that they will never read my column again, and sometimes that they will do both simultaneously.

Less often, readers agree with me, but when I ask if they’d be willing to have their comments published as letters to the editor, they almost always decline. Too controversial, they say. They have to work and live in this town, they say.

Such is the power of organized religion. I write for a newspaper that devotes two pages a week to positive portrayals of organized faith (and with two columnists whose work I enjoy), yet many cry foul when I look at religion critically two or three times a year.

For the record, I have nothing against people of faith in general or Catholics in particular. Some of the best people I know are both. I no longer share or understand their beliefs or reasoning, much as they don’t share or understand mine, but that makes dinner parties more interesting, you know?

And I really like Pope Francis. He appears to be a man of compassion, a true shepherd for his flock, more concerned with a message of universal love than with the preservation of the church’s hierarchy and rather arbitrary rules.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for his handlers, who took his New Testament message of acceptance and covered it with a heaping helping of Old Testament judgment.

His way stood at least a chance of reaching the disenfranchised. Theirs, not so much.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Originally published June 6, 2013, in The Alliance Review.

Stark County commissioners did a favor to convicted felons last week by voting to “ban the box.”

The box, in this case, is the one on county job applications asking applicants to check mark if they have been convicted of a felony. Under the new guidelines, the question now will wait until after a prospective employee has been interviewed.

The change allows applicants to explain criminal records in person, which gives them a better chance of overcoming what, for many employers, is a deal-breaker. Once applicants have sold themselves and their skills, the reasoning goes, interviewers will be more likely to look at the “total package” and not only the conviction.

The change puts Stark County government in line with many states and counties. As of April, the list of entities that had decided to “ban the box” includes public employers in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, Detroit and the entire states of California, Colorado, New Mexico and Minnesota, according to the National Employment Law Project.

These policy changes don’t eliminate background checks. Instead, they move the discussion about felonies to the back burner until after applications have been sorted and interviews scheduled. Employers will still see all red flags before hiring.

A job applicant would be foolish to wait until the final background check to disclose problems with the law. Few things would reflect as badly on an interviewee as being the only one aware of that particular elephant in the room.

There was a time, not too many years ago, when I was opposed to changing these policies. If they did the crime, let them do the time, including any consequences that come later.

That was before I began moonlighting at a community college.

The final writing assignment I give each semester is a problem-and-solution paper, and a topic that is chosen more than most others is how difficult it is for felons to get jobs. It is only at this point in the term, after I’ve gotten to know students individually, that they reveal their spotty legal histories.

We’re talking about stupid crimes by people in their late teens or early 20s. It’s the usual litany of getting in with the wrong crowd, being in the wrong place at the wrong time or not knowing the legal ramifications of a particular action. One in four American adults has a criminal record that shows up on a background check, after all.

Some of my students have been recently released from prison; others did their time years before. Others without legal blemishes of their own are affected by felons in their lives — husbands, wives, parents or children — who struggle to make ends meet.

If you believe it is easy to spot the felons in my classes, I can assure you it isn’t. They look and act like you or me.

My students talk about checking that box on job applications, affixing a statement that explains the convictions and knowing that they are never going to get an interview.

One tearfully told the class about living with a man who sold drugs; when he was arrested, so was she. Ten years later, the stigma lingers.

Another told about receiving a call for an interview, only to have the representative call back the next day to say they’d have to reschedule.

“They never did, and I know why,” he said, “because that’s the way they always do. They saw the box.”

Even with new guidelines in place, public employers in Stark County can still keep reformed felons out of certain positions if that’s what they elect to do. And when two people have similar skill sets and job compatibilities, it makes sense to go with the one whose record is clean.

But maybe in those instances when a felon is clearly the best fit for a position, the new philosophy will embolden county human-resource people to take a chance. I hope so. That sounds like that would be in keeping with the spirit of the policy change.

Because when people put themselves into a box, it’s only fair to give them a fighting chance once they’ve climbed their way out.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Originally published on May 23, 2013, in The Alliance Review.

A ferocious dinosaur lays siege to a roller coaster on Coney Island. The fearsome kraken rises from the sea to claim its latest victim. A hapless sailor and his crew battle sword-wielding skeletons.

These movie moments captivated me as a child. Each time a Ray Harryhausen monster took center stage, I would move the rabbit-ear antenna on the old TV in the basement to improve the picture. Even through a haze of static and commercial interruptions, the illusion held sway. I believed.

Harryhausen, the special-effects maestro who died earlier this month at the age of 92, breathed life into all of the above and many more, a pantheon of monsters hatched from mythology and his own fervid imagination.

Without a doubt, Harryhausen’s special effects were the best part of many films with which he was involved. “Jason and the Argonauts,” for example, is a largely tepid affair, a paint-by-numbers, sword-and-sandal epic about the legendary titular explorer’s attempts to find the Golden Fleece and become king of Thessaly. The acting is wooden and the plot virtually nonexistent.

But every 20 minutes or so, the movie blazes to life when a Harryhausen creation saunters into frame: Talos, the bronze giant, voted the second greatest movie monster of all time (behind King Kong); the Hydra, fierce creature with the head of seven snakes; and, of course, a battalion of skeletons, bones clicking and clacking as they attack Jason and his men.

Harryhausen’s effects are cinematic magic at its finest. Using miniature models, he would shoot one frame of film, stop the camera, move the model infinitesimally, and then shoot the next frame, laboriously building the illusion of movement.

Considering that one second of film contains 24 frames, it would take days to yield only a few seconds of usable film, painstaking labor that would be combined later with live-action footage using reverse projection and other techniques. Working within constraints of time and money (there was never enough of either), the man created marvels.

Harryhausen’s biggest influence was the aforementioned “King Kong,” a movie that both he and fantasy author Ray Bradbury (who died last year) saw at impressionable ages. In the book “Kong Unbound,” Harryhausen dubbed it “the greatest fantasy film ever made.” He later would learn its secrets at the feet of stop-motion pioneer Willis O’Brien, the man who animated “Kong.” Harryhausen worked with O’Brien on the original “Mighty Joe Young,” another movie about a large ape whisked away to civilization.

Harryhausen went on to create special effects for many Hollywood productions, including “20 Million Miles to Earth,” “It Came from Beneath the Sea,” “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers” and “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.” “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” which climaxes with the monster stomping Coney Island, was based on a story by Bradbury and pays homage to the two men’s love of giant monsters.

Harryhausen’s last hurrah was 1981’s “Clash of the Titans,” another romp through mythology. By then, the heyday of stop-motion animation had passed, replaced by a variation called “go motion” that relied on a computer to move the scale models.

“Go motion” itself would have a short shelf life, supplanted by full computer animation 10 years later in “Jurassic Park.” Today, stop-motion, when it is used at all, is done to invoke nostalgia.

Yet there is still much to recommend the earlier method. The herky-jerky look of stop-motion — with puppets manipulated by hand, inflating and deflating bladders hidden inside to simulate breathing — infuses a sense of personality in the finished effect that is sometimes lacking in more seamless computer animation.

Just as King Kong reflects the scrappy nature of O’Brien, the many creatures animated by Harryhausen reflect what I imagine to be his ferocious desire to overwhelm the audience, to make them gasp or smile or shriek.

And, above all, to make them believe.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Originally published May 16, 2013, in The Alliance Review.

This is Teacher Appreciation Week, so I’m doing exactly that — remembering educators who enlightened and inspired me.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the late Melva Jean Watson, second-grade teacher at Washington Elementary, who read aloud from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. Studies prove the benefits of reading to children, and I benefited both from the content of those books and the time spent listening to a capable reader weave words into a literary web.

Reading aloud was a big part of Judy Vien’s classroom circa 1980 at Marlington Middle School. One book in particular cast a potent spell: Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” read by Mrs. Vien in her soft Southern accent, so similar to how I imagined Scout, Atticus, Jem and Dill would sound.

I respected her for sharing a book that some find controversial, especially for sixth-grade students, and for not sugarcoating the expletives. Instead, she explained the racial overtones of the times; that mistreating people because of skin color, education or economic attainment is wrong; and that we were mature enough to know that saying certain words was not the same as endorsing them.

A few years later, Andrea Ogline and Nancy Schwan — my freshman and sophomore English teachers, respectively, at Marlington High School — encouraged my love of writing, each in her own way.

Mrs. Ogline, poor thing, waded through page after page of my journal entries, filled with dreary imitations of stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard and gallons of imaginary blood. Yet she was always enthusiastic in her comments, even when she would have preferred a nice Bronte pastiche to another psychopathic killer inspired by my fetish for horror films.

Mrs. Schwan submitted one of my stories to a regional contest. It didn’t win, but for the first time I thought about making a living with words and saw how revision improved my writing. She took the work so seriously that she once called me at home to address a plot flaw, just like a real editor. I am thankful for that, and how she never assumed that because my character committed suicide, the story was a cry for help. (It wasn’t.)

At Mount Union College, David Ragosin and John Bienz left their marks. The former introduced me to William Zinsser’s “On Writing Well,” one of a handful of books I regularly return to for inspiration, and he once told me I had the makings of a good college professor. My career didn’t go in that direction, but the words did — and do — mean a lot.

Dr. Bienz had such a quiet and unprepossessing manner that he put students, many of whom were secretly terrified of literature at the collegiate level, at ease. While he delivered effective lectures, he was a master of eliciting responses, both in class and on the printed page. I especially remember his Shakespeare class, where instead of a final paper, we performed “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for elementary students. I was the fairy Puck, likely because of my long hair and effeminate build. (Both are victims of my forties.)

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I flattered the heck out of Dr. Bienz my first few years as a teacher, modeling my delivery on his. These days, I’ve found my own voice, but am still largely influenced by his technique.

Like most people, I am the sum total of the efforts of dozens of professionals, from Ms. Meese, the kindergarten teacher who introduced me to the Letter People, through Penny Arnold, an Ashland University professor who made me re-examine my grading methods as a practicing educator.

Even teachers whose subjects aren’t of great interest or whose styles are not inspirational make an impression. When they are passionate about their subjects, it leaves a mark. When they are not, that too speaks volumes.

If our lives are books, teachers occupy a large chunk of the acknowledgments, along with the standard tagline that while they provide a wealth of insight and information, we ourselves are responsible for any errors in fact.

“I am a part of all that I have met,” says Ulysses in Tennyson’s poem of the same name. This is especially true of teachers, whose impact lasts far beyond the final school bell and, indeed, tolls throughout our lives.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Originally published May 9, 2013, in The Alliance Review.

If there were lyrics to “Pomp and Circumstance” for parents of the college graduate set, they might go something like this:

You’re moving your stuff home,

Bringing all that junk back,

Load up that old futon

Get ready to pack.

Or maybe, depending on how the sheepskin was financed, parents could sing:

Your degree cost me thousands

In tuition and fees,

Now you will have no job

With a degree in art history.

No education, of course, is ever wasted, especially when acquiring it involves four years of late-night bull sessions, greasy pizza and liquid calories, at least if what we see in “Animal House” is true. And, of course, Hollywood is always scrupulous in its accurate portrayal of university life, just as it is with police work and domestic issues.

Higher education has been uppermost in my mind recently because my daughter graduated Sunday. I enjoyed the ceremony and her success, yet my back kept twinging. Maybe it was because of three hours spent in bleacher seats, but more likely it was due to all the boxes and furniture I hauled up and down stairs a few days before.

My wife says I have no reason to complain. After all, she took two days off work to help pack and unpack. All I did was show up two afternoons to serve as cart horse for larger items.

Once upon a time, going to college involved just a few milk cartons — borrowed from behind your favorite grocery store, despite the stenciled warning “Thou Shalt Not Steal” — filled with books, sweatshirts and jeans, plus a halfway decent stereo system. You’d live in a dorm room about the size of a closet, with all the aesthetic appeal of a stairwell — cinder blocks, a small window that would be the envy of only the Prisoner of Zenda, and a shower shared by dozens of people, at least one of whom had ringworm.

Today, young adults live better in many college dorms than they will in the first few years after college (unless they move back home and wait five to 10 years for the economy to improve), when those initial apartments look more the way dorms did a few decades ago. Colleges and universities now build student housing to resemble Soho studio lofts, and students enthusiastically cart in enough junk to fill the extra space.

And if a student (like my daughter) moves off campus into a situation that offers even more livable space (she and three friends shared a house), plan on those two milk cartons to morph into 50 or 100, enough to turn a misdemeanor into grand larceny.

Bringing my daughter home was akin to moving a Romanian princess back from exile and involved five car loads and one pickup truck, all filled to bursting. We carried boxes of books, lamps, two TVs, a computer, Ramen noodles, a desk, two chairs, a bed, a dresser, bagels, a Keurig, clothes, shoes, cleaning supplies, cosmetics, clothes, shoes, GRE flashcards, curtains, shoes, potato chips, clothes, rice mixes, over-the-counter medications, pots, pans, clothes and shoes.

Oh, and some clothes and shoes. (Imelda Marcos, eat your heart out.)

And as if further proof is needed that nature abhors a vacuum (although I hear it tolerates a Dyson), most of these collected treasures found a home in my newly cleaned garage, which — for two nights only — was capable of containing a car.

Today, the garage looks like the aftermath of a tornado at a flea market and will remain that way until we trek off with all these treasures again for graduate school in a few months.

In the meantime, though, let us raise our glasses to members of the Class of 2013, who face an exciting future secure in the knowledge that they have already contributed to a financial boom in two key growth areas: construction and medicine.

Self-storage rentals and Doan’s pills sales are through the roof.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Prevailing wisdom among people who study pre-teen reading habits is that girls will read books about boys, but boys are less likely to read books about girls.

Maybe this is changing because of the success of “The Hunger Games,” with a strong female lead whose exploits in three bestselling books are a hit with not only the YA crowd, but adults as well.

I’ve always been an exception to the boys-not-reading-about-girls rule, myself. One of my earliest literary adventures was “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” with spunky Dorothy traveling down “the road of yellow brick,” encountering eccentric companions and showing off her silver slippers to good effect. (Her route became “the yellow brick road” and her footwear turned ruby only in the MGM movie.) I’ve read the book more than a dozen times, and Judy Garland was one of my first big-screen crushes, even if she was too old to play Dorothy.

Recently, I had a chance to revisit another childhood favorite with a female protagonist: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books, newly reprinted in two handsome hardbacks by the Library of America.

These books hold a special place in my heart. When I was a new student at Washington Elementary School in 1976, my second-grade teacher, Melva Jean Watson, read aloud from “Little House on the Prairie” almost every day. Something about the Ingalls family leaving Wisconsin and heading West in a covered wagon struck a chord with me, even if my own migration from Middlebranch to Washington Township in the backseat of a car wasn’t much by comparison.

I am still impressed by the family’s moxy. Laura’s father, referred to mostly as Pa, decides the woods of Wisconsin — immortalized in the first book of the series, “Little House in the Big Woods” — are becoming too crowded. “Quite often Laura heard the ringing thud of an ax which was not Pa’s ax, or the echo of a shot that did not come from his gun,” writes Wilder, who refers to herself in the third person. “The path that went by the little house had become a road.”

Those all sound like good reasons to stay in Wisconsin, not leave it, but nobody has ever accused me of having an overabundance of pioneer spirit.

In the books, little Laura and her sisters often take a backseat to the story of their parents, and Laura’s main occupation is to observe the ways of pioneer families. Not surprisingly for people who lived for — and by — the harvest, the books are filled with food, much more than I remember from age 8. (Maybe Mrs. Watson omitted some parts.)

The Ingalls’ attic in Wisconsin is a veritable produce stand: “The large, round, colored pumpkins made beautiful chairs and tables. The red peppers and the onions dangled overhead. The hams and the venison hung in their paper wrappings, and all the bunches of dried herbs, the spicy herbs for cooking and the bitter herbs for medicine, gave the place a dusty-spicy smell.”

In “Farmer Boy,” which tells the boyhood story of Ingall’s husband, Almanzo Wilder, in New York, mealtime is almost sensuous. “Almanzo ate the sweet, mellow baked beans. He ate the bit of salt pork that melted like cream in his mouth. He ate mealy boiled potatoes, with brown ham-gravy. He ate the ham. He bit deep into velvety bread spread with sleek butter, and he ate the crisp golden crust. He demolished a tall heap of pale mashed turnips, and a hill of stewed yellow pumpkin. Then he sighed …”

All that’s missing is a cigarette afterward.

Nearly every page of the Little House books is filled with industrious people planting, nurturing, harvesting, storing, slaughtering and building for winter. It’s impressive, especially to a reader whose winter preparations involve nothing more than covering the air-conditioning unit with a tarp and buying a new ice scraper for the car.

Wilder’s characters have fun too, going to the occasional dance and inviting extended family to visit at the holidays, but mostly they work.

One of my favorite sequences in the books, however, has nothing to do with harvests or dances. Later in “Farmer Boy,” Almanzo’s teacher drives a group of disruptive students out of his classroom using an ox-whip. Taking the biblical injunction to spare the rod and spoil the child almost literally, the teacher thrashes the students, jerking them off their feet, tearing their clothes and bloodying their bodies.

Maybe it was my imagination, but I always thought Mrs. Watson read that section with even more vim and vigor than the other chapters.

It’s always nice to revisit old friends, and even nicer to find out that they are more companionable than you remember. So it is with the Little House books. While these new editions omit the classic illustrations by Garth Williams, they are hardly missed. Laura Ingalls Wilder still holds me in thrall with stories of pioneer pluck and an almost-vanished lifestyle that appeal to either gender and all ages.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Originally published April 25, 2013, in The Alliance Review.