Christianity's explosive growth in Africa, totally unexpected at the dawn of independence, is part of a startling reversal in world history. Christianity can no longer be identified as a religion of the West, where in 1900 83% of all Christians lived. Instead, now over two-thirds of the world's Christians live in the global South and all signs suggest this proportion will continue to grow. We are turning a page in world history. What does it mean? What is Christianity becoming and what new, perhaps surprising, developments will it foster?

Funded by Pew Charitable Trusts we have pursued these questions, filming 250 hours in Ghana and Zimbabwe, in the entire range of churches found in subsaharan Africa, and editing these in a series of roughcuts praised as follows:

"The most penetrating and informative material I have ever seen on African Christianity, bringing out its vitality and variety without ever sensationalizing or exoticizing."
Terence Ranger, Professor of African History, Oxford University

"Magnificent and often really moving; the whole film would be a dazzling success."
Philip Jenkins, author of The Next Christendom

We are seeking finishing funds to complete this project.

Funded in its pilot phase by the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities and the Northampton Arts Council, the Living History Project aims to create short documentary portraits of people and institutions reflecting our local community's 350-year-history. By showing them on community access cable and in public forums, we will generate discussion and reflection about our common life together, despite recognizable differences and divisions. We will portray institutions and individuals who both reflect Northampton's present-day diversity and help tell its history, through their family stories which intersect with different moments in that history. Subjects will include immigration, issues of gay rights, adaptions by family court to increasing divorce rates, the relation of Smith College to the City and its people, and conflicts between urbane professionals moving in and seeking to transform a community and old-time residents with longstanding local ties to kin, place and tradition.

Pilot phase currently being completed.

"With the authority invested in me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts"‹the wedding crowd roars their approval‹"I pronounce you legally married." With this, on May 18, 2004, a local Unitarian minister united Julie Pokela and Liz Denny in marriage, a lesbian couple who have lived together now for twenty three years. "Gee, this is our last day living in sin," whispers Julie to Liz in the ante chamber before the ceremony. "I donąt know if I know how to be honest anymore," she says laughing.

Using footage shot of the first day of marriage licenses for gay couples in Massachusetts and one of the first gay weddings in the state (Julie and Liz's above), an event which involved key litigants in the Supreme court decision legalizing same sex marriage in the state, we aim to explore growing conflicts over this issue from radically different points of view and very different lives.

We are seeking funding to complete a film for broadcast and educational use both in the United States and abroad.

Since battles over sex education in public school take place in local communities, the issue lends itself to dramatic documentary portrayal that reveals much, in microcosm, about the nature of such conflicts in American society in general. We aim to portray a local community battle over sex education from inside both camps, and in the context of the intimate daily lives of opponents.

Not only through national broadcast, but also through use by PTA's, school boards, and professional associations of teachers, administrators and legislators, such a film could engender discussion promoting greater tolerance and reducing the crippling fear that grips educational policy-making. By bringing into clearer view the context-related (or cultural) character of opposed positions in this controversy, it could begin to reduce polarization and bring about real dialogue. And, it could help give opinion-makers and leaders, local and national, the kind of insight necessary to invent and fashion genuinely effective compromises in areas of enduring and inescapable conflict in American life.

We are looking for start-up funding for this project.

Tells the story of a group of fundamentalist and right-to-lifers, on the one hand, and gay activists and progressives, on the other, who have agreed to take a voyage together on a schooner off the coast of New England. "Are there enough life jackets," several participants asked with genuine worry.

During this trip they will share their life-stories with each other in ways that illuminate their differences, helping them (and viewers) see that their opponents have different positions on things because they start with different assumptions about life, and they have different assumptions about life because they, indeed, have different lives.

We are seeking start-up funding for this genuinely nonpartisan film on these quintessentially American conflicts.