It’s Black Friday, but that also means that the new year starts this weekend! No, not by the Gregorian calendar – by the church calendar, which celebrates the four Sundays leading up to Christmas as the season of Advent. The first Sunday of Advent is this Sunday, December 1. And that means the new year is beginning. If you’re not sure what this Advent season is all about, you might want to check out Mark’s primer, which you can read... Read more
It’s Thanksgiving here in the States today. Here’s a poem to celebrate. Thanksgiving by Linda McCarriston Every year we call it down upon ourselves, the chaos of the day before the occasion, the morning before the meal. Outdoors, the men cut wood, fueling appetite in the gray air, as Nana, Arlene, Mary, Robin—whatever women we amount to— turn loose from their wrappers the raw, unmade ingredients. A flour sack leaks, potatoes wobble down counter tops tracking dirt like kids, blue... Read more
The fiftieth anniversary of C.S. Lewis’s death was last week, and Cambridge University Press published a new collection of his reviews and criticism to commemorate the occasion, including a new essay called “Image and Imagination” that hasn’t been published before. The Guardian has an excerpt: Does anyone suppose that the imaginative value of such fantasies can be divided for a moment from our knowledge of death, and blood, and Christianity? You may say, indeed, that it is not our crystallised knowledge of... Read more
I’ve really been enjoying the work of my friends over at In Earnest, a lovely new web magazine about living intentionally. And while economics has never been my favorite subject, I thought this little piece on capitalism by Laura Herrod (a former student of mine!) was excellent: Words like “capitalism” and terms like “the middle class” are commonly used when discussing what’s happening in our country and our economics. “Middle class struggles are capitalism’s fault,” some cry. Others beg to differ:... Read more
The composer John Tavener died last weekend – a man whose conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy meant a great deal for his composing. Over at The Curator, Brian Gillikin briefly considered the composer’s legacy: Tavener’s Orthodoxy was almost too Orthodox, as he flung himself fully into its mysticism and the Eastern liturgy, both of which became the primary source of all the music he wrote up to his death. His detractors point both to Tavener’s inability to compose far away from his... Read more
One of my favorite writers, Zadie Smith, has a piece in the New York Review of Books on art, corpses, and the problem with a culture full of people who can’t visualize their own bodies once they die: A persistent problem for artists: How can I insist upon the reality of death, for others, and for myself? This is not mere existentialist noodling (though it can surely be that, too). It’s a part of what art is here to imagine for us... Read more
Last week at Christianity Today, we published a review of the new documentary Dear Mr. Watterson, about Bill Watterson, the creator and writer of the fabulous comic strip Calvin and Hobbes: As the title implies, it’s mostly a love letter to Watterson, but not in a stalker-like way. Schroeder maintains his distance, respecting Watterson’s privacy while also trying to learn as much about him as he can. He visits the artist’s hometown in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and talks to some locals. He... Read more
I love sports, and I love art. Both are relatively “useless” things – in an instrumental sense – that still, I think, are important to our lives together. So I was interested in this article published at the Wall Street Journal after the controversy around the $142.4 Francis Bacon triptych sold at Christie’s last week. As the article points out, while the money sounds like a lot, it also is roughly the cost of some mid-tier players in baseball. Here’s the... Read more
If you skipped the Internet this weekend, you might have missed Batkid. And that would be a mistake. On Friday, the city of San Francisco (in partnership with the Make a Wish Foundation) transformed into Gotham to help fulfill the wish of a five-year-old boy with leukemia to be Batman for a day. Here’s a summary of what happened. Twelve thousand volunteers showed up to help, and the White House tweeted that it is “rooting” for Batkid. The U.S. Attorney’s Office released... Read more
Mark D. Roberts
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In
What’s Good – and Not – About ‘The Hunger Games: Catching Fire’
Last Friday, I published a piece on The Hunger Games: Catching Fire at Christianity Today that garnered a ton of response. In it, I talk about not just the movies, but the merchandising: I’m not just frustrated, I’m appalled: all this tie-in merchandise declaws the story of The Hunger Games, in much the same way that the actual affluent Capitol in the books declaws the seriousness of the “real” Hunger Games—a forced gladiatorial battle between teenagers—by staging flashy weeks-long television specials around it in... Read more