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From personal faith to social critique, Marilynne Robinson’s When I Was a Child I Read Books presents an incisive, hopeful approach toward understanding culture and loving others.

To illuminate the complex vision of human nature in The Dark Knight, Lauren Wilford traces the development of Director Christopher Nolan’s worldview from his early noir pictures to the Batman films.

Just last week, I was reading Deena Weinstein’s landmark 1991 study Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology and I was nearly stopped in my tracks by the final chapter, which deals with metal’s “detractors” from across the political spectrum. While conservative criticisms of heavy metal are well-known through the work of groups like the Parents Music […]

Since becoming a parent, I’ve become acutely aware of movies that deal with the impact that parents, and particularly fathers, have on their children’s lives, for better or worse. Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s Still Walking fascinated me so because of that theme. Malick’s The Tree of Life left me shaking and undone because of it. It explains why, […]

A headline on Joe Romm’s fine climate-change blog, RealClimate, gives me pause: “Tennessee Enacts ‘Monkey Bill’ To Dumb Down Kids In Biology And Physics, Undermine Their Future.”  The bill — now law — orders schools to help teachers present the “scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses” of “controversial” topics such as “biological evolution, the chemical origins of […]

            From the very first time I was introduced to the work of Jean-Luc Marion, I was captivated with his account of the passive self and saturated phenomenon. Being principally concerned with the human propensity for self-righteousness, Marion’s philosophy provided me with a way to think the Christian experience while […]

Blue Like Jazz, the new film by director Steve Taylor, is based on Donald Miller’s New York Times-bestselling memoir. It’s the biggest filmmaking success story in the history of the Kickstarter program, earning $345,000 in donations to help cover its costs. Were their investments rewarded? If you skim through the reviews, you might be inclined […]

Becky Garrison may very well be Christianity’s most interesting court jester. And yes, that is a compliment. I like to fancy myself quite the juggler (and I have all kinds of funky hats–striped tights, too), but I have nothing on the writings of one Ms. Becky G. She represents well the ever-growing necessity of the theological […]

In “Sequence,” J. D. Smith offers a startling contrast of nightmarish images—an animal lured for an empty sacrifice and a watery attempt to escape from one’s self.