Christ and Pop Culture
Where the Christian Faith Meets March Madness
Remember Six Days in Fallujah, the video game based on real life war events? They’re looking for a publisher, and Micahael Abbott says someone should Step up and get it out there.
An article from the inaugural issue of the Jewish Review of Books explores why so few fantasy writers have been Jewish:
To put it crudely, if Christianity is a fantasy religion, then Judaism is a science fiction religion. If the former is individualistic, magical, and salvationist, the latter is collective, technical, and this-worldly. Judaism’s divine drama is connected with a specific people in a specific place within a specific history. Its halakhic core is not, I think, convincingly represented in fantasy allegory. In its rabbinic elaboration, even the messianic idea is shorn of its mythic and apocalyptic potential. Whereas fantasy grows naturally out of Christian soil, Judaism’s more adamant separation from myth and magic render classic elements of the fantasy genre undeveloped or suspect in the Jewish imaginative tradition.
President Obama draws fire for his support of the complete lay-off of the staff at a failing Rhode Island School. This school had a terrible graduation rate and a 7% passage rate on state math tests. The article mentions some of President Obama’s education policies. Though I don’t line up with his ideas completely, I think he is doing some interesting and, by government standards, innovative things to improve public education.
A church in Phoenix is told they can no longer serve the homeless and needy at their church building because it threatens the safety of their community…what do you think?
Russell Moore, from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, writes about Misguided Christian Outrage
Olympic figure skater Johnny Weir responded to criticisms and questions about his manhood.
Eve Tushnet on the movie that The Last Station could have been:
Jesus himself said that following Him would mean putting aside family ties: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” A movie exploring the radical nature of this demand, the way in which God-above-all might mean the disruption of families and friendships, marriages and patriotic loyalties, and all the ordinary ways in which we bind ourselves to one another, could be fascinating. It could challenge our strange belief that Christianity is coterminous with “family values,” with the bourgeois social order. If that movie starred Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren, well, we’d have a classic on our hands.
I’ll be seeing The Last Station this weekend, so my own review will be forthcoming.
Christian Olympians: You Can Be Christian and Competitive – Those who heard our discussion on this podcast about the Olympics may find this article an interesting follow-up.
A Wall Street Journal reporter believes that hunger can be conquered and that the church is the most important player in the fight.
If you haven’t already heard of Chat Roulette, it’s probably safer to watch this video than go there yourself…
Whose Bible is it Anyway? Who is the ultimate authority over what is true? How does that affect what we think and believe?
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