popular culture

(Not recommended.)

As this writing, Boston is under siege, with one bombing suspect killed, and one on the run. But still there is little that is certain about why the attack was carried out.

It’s hard to overstate Phillips’ influence on today’s religiously-inflected conservatism.

Or maybe it’s not so simple.

As usual, Malick also provides us with some of the most sympathetic religious figures one sees on the American screen.

So far as I can tell, nothing in our language or in our collective practice, digital or otherwise, holds space for such moments of spiritual pause, however secularized that spirituality might be.

We saw it after Sandy Hook and Kermit Gosnell, and it’ll probably crop up in discussions of Boston.

The notion that the news media is a secularist cabal ignoring stories that challenge its shibboleths is wrongheaded. The media is not sentient and its decisions are not logical. It reacts more than acts, often driven by random factors (What did my husband say over breakfast? Who’s trending on Twitter? When was the last time I read a story about ____?). Equally mistaken is the premise that if there were more believers in the nation’s newsrooms things would be different.

This is not just a dancing cat blog.

This time, it’s the parents who are vulnerable.