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At The Daily Beast, Daniel Radosh (who, incidentally, started a Beliefnet book club for his “Rapture Ready”) uses the occasion of the Christian blockbuster “Fireproof” to make a larger point about insular Christian entertainment: Not only does it speak exclusively to the Christian audience (while purportedly being evangelistic), but it does so dishonestly. Under the guise…

I watched Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama with rapt attention yesterday. In terms of rationale, he essentially echoed the Christopher Hitchens approach, emphasizing Obama’s strengths of character, temperament, and personality and trusting that those strengths would be with him during a White House tenure. He also spoke my own mind in saying that one…

In my post on “Religulous,” I made the point that Bill Maher exudes a shockingly self-righteous certitude in his own position–and at the movie’s end, literally preaches a gospel of Maherism and warns doom for all who don’t see his light. (The comments about this in the thread below echo a similar exchange at Steven…

Congratulations to my dear friend and BU colleague Martyn Oliver, who passed his dissertation defense yesterday in Boston. (He’s also getting hitched in 3 weeks–not a bad autumn.) I’ve had the pleasure of reading bits of his dissertation, which is about the literary construction of Islam. Martyn Dr. Oliver tells the story of how the story…

There is a lot of talk about whether young evangelicals are moving anywhere politically, or whether they’ll be more of the same. There is plenty of evidence for the latter so far in this election cycle, but there is also evidence for a shift with regard to tone and style–culture war exhaustion is one of…

Richard Mouw, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, sent along this story by a woman who had a harrowing, inspiring experience with the delivery of her Downs Syndrome baby in Bulgaria. He heard the woman sharing her testimony in a recent church service, and asked her to type it up so he could share it…

I’m way late to this, but just saw it last night and wanted to weigh in briefly. I had planned to address several of the key problems, as well as acknowledge its (few) pleasures as a movie, but Steve Waldman did the yeoman’s job already. Read each of his pointed critiques (the full list is here).…

I’m not sure if any team that has a whole nation of fans can claim to also have a bandwagon…but still, since both Bill Simmons’ father and I turned the channel before the 7th inning last night (in fairness, I had a late show of “Religulous” to get to), this card is apropos. (hat tip:…

Coming soon in this space: an interview with Andy Crouch on his invaluable new book, Culture Making. Andy’s book is one of the wisest books on the subject of culture I’ve ever read, and it’s the single best work on the Christian cultural mandate that I’ve ever read.  To whet your appetite: James Smith speaks…

As I was writing that earlier post on Apple’s new MacBook, drooling over a product I want but absolutely do not need, I got a timely dose of reality. My Twitterific updated itself and showed me a long series of tweets from the folks at Blog Action Day, who were announcing progress on this today’s…
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