popular culture

A brochure for the land boasts that the buyer can sit and “let your mind wander back in time & imagine the Native Americans… who passed across this land that is now a part of yours & your family’s legacy forever!” Buyer beware on that “forever” stuff.

Much of the Pussy Riot trial has focused on the shifting role of the Church from the Soviet era, but what’s less well known is the Church’s efforts to mute dissenters outside of Russia.

In short: for “hooliganism.”

Rather than approach stories on their own uncomfortable terms, Rick Warren’s new diet plan pulls exiled, bewildered Daniel away from the king’s table and demands, “Tell me the secret to controlling your carb intake!”

Game Change reveals what no one else apparently has the chutzpah to say: that Sarah Palin was the opening salvo in the the dissolution and destruction of the Republican Party.

And why servicemen and -women but not the victims of mass shootings, mining disasters, bridge collapses, or grain elevator explosions—all of whom have been threatened with funeral pickets? And why not those who have died of AIDS-related illnesses, the original targets of WBC pickets? Why are some deaths worthy of dignity and some not?

After Baptist bookstore chain LifeWay refused to stock evangelical darling The Blind Side, some Christian authors are challenging what one calls the store’s “stranglehold” on Christian books. Is this the end of retailers’ control over industry standards?

The reclusive filmmaker understood that the truth of history, like myth, can only be approached as a sensual experience.

Most insiders to this world are privy to the open secret of gospel’s deep reliance on the contributions and influence of gay men and women. But Heilbut opens wide the closet doors and peers in with the bright light of righteous outrage for the plight of the children in an increasingly homophobic religious culture, while also bringing a deeply felt sensitivity for the stories of the children and their musical sensibility. As he writes: “It is impossible to understand the story of black America without foregrounding the experiences of the gay men of gospel.”

What ought we do about millennial thinking in our day? If the combined 1300 pages of these two books have taught me anything, it’s that we can’t make it just go away. There is something fascinating, and perverse, in the human psyche that seems to yearn for this world to be other than how it is, even if that means destroying it.