Ron Reed

Roy Anker: Of Pilgrims and Fire / Catching Light

Roy Anker has a film book already in print – Catching Light: Looking For God In The Movies. I like it: he’s a lit guy, so he brings substantial insights, treats the films as art not sermon illustrations, and has a pretty good eye for film as well as text. And he writes well. It looks like his new book draws on the earlier volume, but there’s lots new too. . . .

Kj Swanson

The Bruises of Bella Swan: Confronting the Evangelical Embrace of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, Part III

See Part I of this essay series, in which Swanson begins her analysis of evanglical responses to the Twilight series by examining Twilight’s false message of abstinence, and Part II, in which she critiques New Moon’s portrayal of men as “protectors” and women as “perpetual, self-sacrificing victims.” Here in Part III, Swanson examines the dangerous sexual dynamic between Edward […]

Daniel Bowman Jr.

To a Famous Poet with a Bad Poem in a Famous Magazine

That field behind the barn across the road, how it once perfected your desires in summer sun . . . To sit in that grass right now, would you offer up a poem? Let the eyes of orioles fund you— let the wind publish you on leaves? All right, draw one more sip of your […]

Adams Miller

Expositions: Zizek and Milbank

My friend and colleague Gregory Hoskins is editing an interdisciplinary journal called Expositions. He and the journal recently hosted a roundtable discussion about the Zizek/Milbank interchange. You can find the discussion here. Contributors include Jeffrey Robbins, Brian Robinette, Frederiek Depoortere, Clayton Crockett, and Adam Kotsko. You can find a link to my own thoughts on the […]

Jeffrey Overstreet

Watch Jim Henson's 9-minute short film: Time Piece

I can’t decide whether this is an incredible little film with a clever soundtrack, or an incredible little soundtrack with clever visual accompaniment. Time Piece, by Jim Henson It’s delightfully inventive, whatever it is. But for his fans, Time Piece has its sobering aspects. It’s saddening to be reminded of Henson’s early genius, considering how […]

Schuy R. Weishaar

The Dyslexic Jew

I A dilapidated yellow ice cream truck parked outside the fenced microwave tower, about a mile outside the tiny township of Cisco, Illinois. Aside from the few silver grain silos and the blinking elevator at the Co-op in town, the buzzing tower was the only vertical sign of human progress in the expanse of corn, […]

Geoffrey Holsclaw

Towards a New Missional Mapping?

Jason Clark will be presenting this recent digest of missional theology later in November at ‘Seek the Welfare of the City‘. We thought that it would be helpful for you all to engage it here. Is there any pointing mapping the missional church? Is there a future for Evangelicalism? Let us know. Towards a New […]

Katie Kresser

The Real Jeff Koons: Consumer Culture and the Grammar of Desire

In 1980 the young artist Jeff Koons presented his first major solo exhibition, a window installation at New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art, titled, appropriately, The New. Alongside hermetically sealed vitrines showcasing “ready-made”1 household appliances like a New Hoover Deluxe Rug Shampooer and a New Shelton Wet/Dry 10 Gallon, there were images: meticulously reproduced […]