Ive been discussing themes that will be developed in a forthcoming book, American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile . The book, God willing and my complying, will be out in the first part of next year. As you may remember from last week, the subject is living an authentic Christian life . . . . Continue Reading »
Before many Christians are ready for the rapture, they apparently have a lot of baggage to unpack. Lucky for them, Daniel Radosh has taken it upon himself to shake out all their dirty laundry. In his recently published book, Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop . . . . Continue Reading »
Wendell Willkie is back in the news these days in Indiana, thanks to Mary Beth Dunnichay. She is the youngest American Olympian and the only other famous person to be claimed by Elwood Indiana, population 9,096. Dunnichay is a fifteen-year-old synchronized diver. Willkie was the Republican nominee . . . . Continue Reading »
A great man died last week, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and we need to think about how to honor and remember him. Otherwise, he will fade into history as a great figure of the twentieth century who played a major role¯along with Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II¯in . . . . Continue Reading »
If you took an opinion poll, youd probably find that the large majority of Americas Latin professors are fairly standard-issue liberals, politically indistinguishable from the rest of the nations academics. But, somewhere along the line, the public praise of Latin seems to have . . . . Continue Reading »
I mentioned here before Bishop Eusebius (260¯339), who is often called the father of Church history, and wrote about the conjunction of Church and Empire in a manner that is today frequently dismissed as triumphalistic. Even in his own time, Eusebius hyper-confident reading of . . . . Continue Reading »
This will, in due course, become a book, tentatively titled American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile . The subject is living an authentically Christian life between the now of Christs victory and the not yet of a promised Kingdom delayed. The not yet . . . . Continue Reading »
Can everything around here be got? oil man Daniel Plainview asks. Sure is the reply. And so There Will Be Blood , roughly adapted from Upton Sinclairs Oil ! and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson ( Boogie Nights ), begins to gush¯rage and sweat and blood.There . . . . Continue Reading »
At the climax of Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest , R.P. McMurphy, the irascible antihero who believed time in a madhouse was preferable to time in the Big House, has succeeded in making life miserable for a psychiatric hospital’s staff and tolerable for its inmates. . . . . Continue Reading »
Oh for the days of the old Hollywood Production Code, when men were men, women were ladies, and sociopaths werent always the coolest guys in the room. You remember the Production Code: that system of dos and donts more or less agreed upon by moral watchdogs and studio heads to ensure . . . . Continue Reading »