Over at Beliefnet, Michael Kress has a coup of an interview—one that includes audio clips—with Denzel Washington, who starred in two films this year: American Gangster and the just-released The Great Debaters—both based on true stories.

Like all the Bnet interviews, which have included Q & A’s with Jane Fonda, Patricia Heaton, and Susan Sarandon, the questions focus on the spiritual pilgrimage of the interviewees.

Turns out that Washington is a member of the West Angeles Church of God in Christ, a 22,000-member evangelical and charismatic congregation.* The actor admits, though, to experimenting with Eastern philosophies and reading the Qur’an, finally returning to the faith in which he was reared.

I’m sure there are plenty of evangelicals who shake their heads at the likes of Washington, Christians who make R-rated films filled with four-letter words, violence, and/or nudity. But Washington approaches his film choices with an eye toward a bigger message than “keep it sanitized”—for example, “the wages of sin is death” in Training Day, the film for which he was awarded a much-deserved Best Actor Oscar.

Seems Washington prays through every decision when it comes to putting a film together, but if there is one theme in his prayer life, it’s apparently “A whole lot of thank you’s.”

(Check out the sidebar link to The Twelve Most Powerful Christians in Hollywood. Washington comes in at number two. One guess who reigns at number one.)

*Read the church’s Statement of Faith: The Blessed Hope is construed as the rapture, as opposed to the more traditional interpretation of Titus 2:13 as Christ’s Second Coming in glory signaling the final judgment and the end of history—not merely a millennial interlude. In dispensational/rapture theology, we have a second and a third coming—the second for the saved at the time of the “great tribulation” (pre-, mid-, or post-) and yet a third that will initiate the Great White Throne (final) judgment, just before the birth of a new heaven and a new earth. John Nelson Darby, call your office . . .

Repressed-memory syndrome—a claim that dissociative amnesia follows a traumatic experience—was one of the most popular psychiatric diagnosis in the 1980s and 1990s. Back in 2003, Paul McHugh wrote what was probably the definitive account of the long struggle by a handful of psychiatrists and researchers to contain the metastasizing diagnosis, which was being offered as an explanation for nearly everything unpleasant in human life. To large degree, they succeeded: The memory wars are over, for the most part, and it’s hard to find anyone willing to stand up and defend the broad application of repressed memories.

Still, the diagnosis has not entirely disappeared, and a researcher in Boston, Harrison Pope, began wondering what exactly it would mean to claim that dissociative amnesia is a disease to which the human brain is innately susceptible. Surely we could find references to it throughout the history of literature. So, in collaboration with a team of other researchers, he began pouring through fiction and memories from the classical age on—and he offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who could find a work from before 1800 that revealed the phenomenon.

The Harvard alumni magazine has a short account of the result. The researchers themselves came up with two Victorian examples: Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, in which a man forgets he is a doctor during his time in the Bastille, and Kipling’s Captains Courageous, in which a man forgets he is a minister after the death of his family in a flood. The $1,000 prize for pre-1800 examples was awarded just once, for a 1786 French opera, Nina, in which the heroine forgets that she saw her lover apparently killed in a duel and waits for him daily to return.

The social and artistic explanations that Pope offers are interesting, though not immediately persuasive. Still, he seems to have lit upon an interesting point in the absence of references to dissociative amnesia before 1786. “The challenge,” he points out, “falls upon anyone who believes that repressed memory is real to explain its absence for thousands of years.”

So, the actor Will Smith tells a British newspaper that “Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘let me do the most evil thing I can do today.’” Whereupon he is pilloried for praising Hitler.

Roger Kimball has a solid roundup of the supposed scandal. Will Smith is, at the moment, the most successful and bankable star in Hollywood, and that’s not usually a postion of authority for philosophical rumination. Still, don’t you have to push pretty hard to make this into anything like praise for Hitler? It looks like a straightforward Aristotelian proposition that human beings have to think the intentions of their actions good, or they wouldn’t do them. And Hitler, in Smith’s line, is clearly chosen as the example because we know that he did evil.