popular culture

After the emotion evoked by the film subsides, sober consideration begins here: why, in the supposedly “post-racial” age of Obama, is there no space in movies to imagine the historical story of African Americans creating the conditions of their own emancipation?

At the end of the day, ministry without meaningful engagement is merely a form of advertising.

’Tis the season to be jolly? Well, not if you attended the annual AAR-SBL national meeting in Chicago’s McCormick Place. If the experience of others was like mine, those of us with some years on the scene came away deeply dissatisfied.

What happens in the Middle East isn’t always about us.

Arkansas’ evangelical culture enabled Wal-Mart to grow without its employees having any power to negotiate for better working conditions. But as it grew to become the world’s largest retailer, it expanded into urban and other areas with markedly different cultures—a transformation that looks to be changing the balance of power.

“I have a story that will make you believe in God,” an elderly man tells the narrator of Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi (2001). This is the opening of a very tall tale, one that’s designed to chasten the reader’s skepticism.

While the Catholic Church has certainly gone out of its way to encourage the use of social media to spread the gospel, it’s unlikely it intended the creepy surveillance that recently took place in a Minnesota parish.

I’d start singing, “I’m getting married in the morning” from My Fair Lady, only Gary and I are both officially members of GLAM (Gays and Lesbians Against Musicals), and he just wouldn’t have it.

No, not Bond, but…

Flight, like most of the other religiously-themed scripts to which Washington agrees to lend his star power, is no Kirk Cameron morality play. As in The Book of Eli, in which Washington played a post-apocalyptic loner who creates a trail of gore during a violent spiritual pursuit of the lone remaining copy of the Bible, the celluloid preaching in Flight is rated R. In addition to the early lingering shots of full-frontal and rear nudity, the film provides a steady stream of f-bombs, and from nearly start to finish it is awash in booze.