If the people who profess belief in God were to actually live with intentionality—in their business decisions, in their classrooms, in their television broadcasts and movie scripts, in their community organizations, and in their art—together we would transform the culture. One advantage I have in this conversation is that the Elliott household continues the discussion [...]
Van Dyke’s religion and politics are really to be found in entertainment. He thinks he never really gave up on his teen desire to be a minister, “—only the medium and the message has changed. I have still endeavored to touch people’s souls, to raise their spirits and put smiles on their faces.” That he’s [...]
"Stalag 17," set in a German prisoner of war camp during World War II, is a genuine Christmas movie, albeit a complex one: at once a mystery, a comedy, a war story, and a morality play, all wrapped in barbed wire. Die Hard changed the definition of a “Christmas movie,” mostly providing dads an excuse [...]
How can we rebuild culture and community in a world where we seem to be glued together in pragmatic tribes, looking across the divide at deadly enemies? One answer is to rediscover the parts of life that make up the whole of a healthy community, and what better way to embark on our study of [...]
What’s unnerving about Guillermo del Toro’s "Frankenstein" is that it embraces and glorifies the creature in ways that remind me, on one hand, of the Romantic valorization of Milton’s Satan, and on the other, of our contemporary headlong development of artificial intelligence. Like Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus (not a great play), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (not [...]
The horror genre is not about gore. Rather, it is about the human soul: its capacity for depraved conduct, but also its capacity to recognize the natural order of our existence and to work to re-establish that order at great sacrifice and in the face of evils born of hubris, self-divinization, and even tragic error. [...]
To the 21st-century reader, the suggestion that cinema is a destructive and corrosive force will likely appear absurd. To attentive cultural critics of the early 20th century, however, it was all but self-evident. You’ve heard it before, certainly: The screens are killing us. They play to our basest passions and appetites, rendering us passive, and [...]
Better than any historian, storyteller Gertrud von le Fort brings her unique genius for laying bare the human heart in making sense of and finding redemption amid the horror of human suffering. Is there a Catholic home in America that does not display an Infant of Prague watching over the family from the top of [...]
In the Gospel, we see neither the dominance of man over beast nor worship of the awesome ocean swell. Rather, nature moves these fishermen to something greater—Jesus Christ, the power of God, the wisdom of God, the author of all nature. There’s nothing like a good fish tale. Man grappling with nature. The allure of [...]
Today, people commonly turn a blind eye and a blind mind to the plagues that threaten to destroy Western culture and human identity, and that move silently beneath the face of placid waters. Fifty years ago today, Steven Spielberg’s suspense thriller, Jaws, took the world by surprise as the pulsing two-note theme and the invisible [...]
The Mosaic Church (2025) is an engaging new documentary film about an extraordinary archeological discovery of recent times. In 2004, excavators renovating a prison near the ancient city of Megiddo in northern Israel came across a mosaic floor that, as soon became apparent, originally covered the floor of a Christian worship hall in Roman times. [...]
Joel Coen’s "The Tragedy of Macbeth" reminds us at a visceral level that the supernatural and the natural worlds are interwoven in a matrix of good and evil. When Macbeth dabbles in the occult, he lets loose the lords of darkness. A stark, new cinematic take on Macbeth is Joel Coen’s 2021 adaptation The Tragedy [...]
"The Young Pope" is unexpectedly different, painting a picture of the Vatican that is at once repulsive and frightening, yet also beautiful, mysterious, and at times even holy. Hollywood’s brush tends to paint the Vatican in colors dark and foreboding, a lavishly decorated place of simony and secret sexual sins. The papal throne is made [...]
To every man upon this earth/ Death cometh soon or late./ And how can man die better/ Than facing fearful odds,/ For the ashes of his fathers,/ And the temples of his gods. —Thomas Babington Macaulay How much resistance is a man—and a country—obligated to muster against insurmountable odds? This is the central question of [...]