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What Keeps Us Going

I’ve 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 »

Are you Ready?

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 »

The Return of Wendell Willkie

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 »

Cum Mortuis in Lingua Mortua

If you took an opinion poll, you’d probably find that the large majority of America’s Latin professors are fairly standard-issue liberals, politically indistinguishable from the rest of the nation’s academics. But, somewhere along the line, the public praise of Latin seems to have . . . . Continue Reading »

Drawing the Line

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 Christ’s victory and the “not yet” of a promised Kingdom delayed. The “not yet” . . . . Continue Reading »

There Will Be Blood

“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 Sinclair’s Oil ! and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson ( Boogie Nights ), begins to gush¯rage and sweat and blood.There . . . . Continue Reading »

Goya’s Ghosts

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 »

A Christian at the Movies

Oh for the days of the old Hollywood Production Code, when men were men, women were ladies, and sociopaths weren’t always the coolest guys in the room. You remember the Production Code: that system of dos and don’ts more or less agreed upon by moral watchdogs and studio heads to ensure . . . . Continue Reading »

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