M. Leary

Rectify (Season 2, Ep. 2) The Evangelical Female in Her TV Habitat

  In the first season of Rectify, Daniel Holden was released from death row to a town with differing opinions regarding his innocence. One of the more unexpected responses to this conundrum was that of his devout sister-in-law, Tawney. We could quickly count appearances of the “bible study girl” in network television or date night cinema, […]

David A. Garner

The Briefing 6.28.14

The Verge claims that the U.S. has very few options to save Iraq: Less than four years after the withdrawal of American troops, Iraq is once again descending into chaos and violence. Islamist insurgents from an al-Qaeda breakaway group have seized large swaths of northern Iraq, and are marching toward Baghdad. The unrest has inflamed […]

M. Leary

Rectify as "Christian Art"

Daniel Holden has been on a Georgia death row for the rape and murder of his girlfriend for 19 years and has been released following new DNA evidence. Newly loose upon the world, he is distant, vague, as motivationally inscrutable as a Flannery O’Connor anti-hero. His fiercely loyal sister and parents are getting used to […]

Carl Raschke

There is No Such Thing as “Church”…Just Us In Faithful Relation To Each Other

As some kind of Christian most, if not all, of my life  I have always taken for granted – even if at times “taking” it also meant wanting to “leave” it – something called the church. The very title of this blog, i.e., “the church and postmodern culture”, assumes there is actually something “there” (a […]

M. Leary

Ida (Pawlikowski, 2013)

Pawlikowski’s Ida is a throwback to an era during which directors took their craft seriously enough to produce worlds with such haunting precision they still seem a bit more important than our own. There is much Bresson, Dreyer, and even a little Bergman in Ida. It is full of solid building blocks of composition; basic thematic […]

Jeremy Purves

The Immigrant (Gray, 2013)

“The waters of the harbor were translucent and aquamarine; they ran thick with shards of ice and white islands as big as polar bears. Ellis Island lay in the distance, its Byzantine domes and blood-red roofs glowing the morning sunshine … Having passed through already, I knew the power of the Island and feared that […]

David A. Garner

The Briefing 6.20.14

Online publications know a lot about you, particularly about what you do online. In fact, they may know better than you do. The Atlantic explains it in detail. You may not realize this, but we can see you. Yes, you. The human reading this article. We have analytics that tells us roughly where you are, what site […]

J. Aaron Simmons

Videos from “What is Christian Philosophy?” SCP/SCPT Conference

This March, the 2014 Midwest meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers met together with the Society of Continental Philosophy and Theology at Trinity College in Palos Heights, IL. The theme of the joint conference was “What is Christian Philosophy?” and was chosen in honor of the 30th anniversary of the publication of Alvin Plantinga’s […]

Matthew Shedden

The Briefing 6.13.14

Each Friday we compile a list of interesting links and articles our editors find from across the web. Here’s what’s catching our eye this week. The Slenderman killings covered at the Verge: In recent days, the soul-searching brought on by senseless violence coalesced around the creepypasta community. Did the creepypasta community convince the girls that […]