The Daily Mail announces breathlessly that “Christianity in Europe is dying out.” This is just the latest in a long series of such stories that flit about the Internet, often heralded with equal glee by atheists (for obvious reasons) and by conservative American Christians who are happy to use their European brothers and sisters as a foil for their own allegedly more vibrant expression of the faith. Peter Ormerod responds in the Guardian that this alleged “death” is actually a... Read more

In this post, I’m going to lay out what I think the film The Last Jedi is about, and why the film is, for me at least, a thorough-going success, rivaling the original trilogy. This is not to deny the validity of many of the criticisms that have been made. The film doesn’t, for instance,  do a good job of explaining why the situation is so desperate and why the Republic appears to have failed entirely. But on the other hand,... Read more

I’ve been working on a series of blog posts on Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation, which was published five years ago and which I finished reading about a year ago. So it probably shouldn’t surprise that I am now writing not about the new Star Wars (which I’m going to see on Tuesday) but the last one, which I only just watched last night (in preparation for seeing the new one). I’d heard a lot of mixed reports on it–many... Read more

Several weeks ago, I finally watched Martin Scorsese’s film Silence. Given the title and the theme, it’s probably appropriate that it’s taken me so long to write about it, though that’s fairly typical for me. For people who don’t already know the film: it’s based on a book by the Japanese novelist Shusako Endo, which is in turn based on historical events of the early 17th century during the Japanese persecution of Christians. A Portuguese Jesuit missionary, Christovao Ferreira, has... Read more

I have been meaning for some time to write a review of Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation, which came out five years ago now and attracted a lot of attention. Reformation scholars, at least those focusing on theology, have, generally, panned the book, while Catholic apologists of course find it red meat. Personally, I greeted it with delight when I first began to read it, as the book I would have wished to write myself if I had had the... Read more

My friend David Schell has asked me (and several other prolifers he knows) to respond to the viral post describing Patrick Tomlinson’s supposedly deadly challenge to the prolife position. Several good responses have already been written, including some fine posts on David’s FB page. Here’s mine. In Tomlinson’s scenario, we have a choice between saving a five-year-old child or 1000 embryos from a fire. This is, of course, a variant of the “trolley problem,” and as in all such dilemmas,... Read more

The Episcopal priest Sarah Condon has just written a defiant blog post expressing her frustration with (male) Protestant clergy who mourn the Reformation. She gives three basic reasons (or sets of reasons) for celebrating the Reformation: 1. Women can be ordained and clergy can be married (openly and legally–she points out correctly that a large number of medieval priests lived in illicit but tacitly accepted relationships with women, and that the women involved were called “whores” and had a low... Read more

High and Low is a 1963 movie by Akira Kurosawa which I saw a few days ago. It’s a modern police procedural, with the rather cliched plot of a kidnapper who taunts the father of his victim by phone and seems to have uncanny abilities to see what his target is doing. (Actually, perhaps it wasn’t cliched in 1963.) Except that the target of the extortion demand, played by Toshiro Mifune, isn’t actually the father of the victim. The kidnapper... Read more