SO WHY DO THEY DO IT? AOL ran a poll last week that asked the question: Do celebrity activists affect your political opinions? 472,469 people voted in the poll, with 93% registering a “No” vote. Personally, celebrity activists do sway me. They make me want to be on the opposite side.

MOVING BEYOND THE FISH, RAINBOW, SHEPHERD AND EARTHEN VESSEL I’m going to spend lots of time in this blog, plumbing the depths of the 1999 Letter to Artists written by John Paul II. Here is a paragraph that regularly sends me spinning off into creative pondering. “The art which Christianity encountered in its early days [...]

TOWARDS A CHRISTIAN AESTETHIC OF ENTERTAINMENT This just in: The Popular Culture is Not Going Away. If we, the People of God, are going to see any improvement in entertainment, we first have to know what actually is the goal in entertainment productions. What is the role of entertainment in human life, and what would [...]

ACT ONE ON THE WIRE The brilliant and, oh, so culturally astute, Terry Mattingly, has just done a story on Act One. Terry writes for the Scripps-Howard News Service, so this story could be in as many as 600 papers. So far, I found it in the Anchorage Daily News and the Sacramento Bee. I [...]

“FOR BOMPI” I was a party to Far From Heaven today. This film must have been named by the same ironic little devils that came up with “The Hours.” That title held a dark foreshadowing of how long the movie would seem to theatergoers. This title sets up, in a menacingly madcap way, lots of [...]

A BLOG FOR WRITERS Novelist, television scribe and esteemed Act One faculty member, Karen Hall, has started a blog on writing. She has begun by talking about the importance of writing from a credo. Check it out.

FROM THEOLOGIAN, MARTIN SCORSESE In today’s Hollywood Reporter, director Martin Scorsese is asked if he anticipated the controversy that surrounded The Last Temptation of Christ. Scorsese: No, I didn’t expect that. I knew there would be some people who would be upset, but this was a theme we discussed very often in high school – [...]

A SAD DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD “The whole idea is to look at the television camera and present as much love as you possibly could to a person who might feel that he or she needs it.” (Fred Rogers in CNN Interview) I had the opportunity to meet Fred Rogers two years ago. He was [...]

MORE GOOD NEWS FOR THE FUTURE I’ve been brooding over the reality TV excesses lately, trying to figure out how we, as a culture, got where we are, and where we might be headed. I found this quote on Bizarre Science, which didn’t make me feel better, except that it started me brooding over where [...]

BECAUSE, YOU SEE, IN HOLLYWOOD, THE MESSIAH HASN’T COME YET Daily Variety reports yesterday that two big animation houses (Visionbox Prods. and X-42 Prods.) are partnering on a 3-D animated flick called, The Chosen One. Story is about an average Joe who is revealed to be “the Messiah,” (Variety’s words, not mine) and has to [...]