Keller on the Christian Life

Last updated on: May 26, 2025 at 9:54 am By Coyle Neal

Let’s start with some confusion. The book under review here is called Tim Keller on the Christian Life: The Transforming Power of the Gospel (by Matt Smethurst). This book is excellent, so there’s no confusion there. And it’s helpful whether you’re familiar with Keller’s ministry or not, so no confusion about that either. It’s clearly divided into distinct topic chapters–all good there as well! Overall, Tim Keller on the Christian Life is an excellent, useful, and devotional work that should absolutely be... Read more

The Comfort of Horror

Last updated on: May 27, 2025 at 9:05 am By Coyle Neal

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This is the third part of a series on the cultural moment of horror Horror is a comfortable genre. Wait, what? How can horror be “comfortable”? Isn’t it the genre where people are chopped up onscreen, jump scares abound, and the bad guy always somehow slips away at the end or comes back to life in the sequel? How does horror offer “comfortable engagement”? Simple, horror is full of recognizable tropes that require little or no work on the part... Read more

Does Clarkson farm?

Last updated on: May 27, 2025 at 10:10 am By Coyle Neal

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Is Jeremy Clarkson Really a Farmer? Clarkson’s Farm is back for its fourth season, and so far like the previous three seasons it is excellent. It has all the drama and action and humor of the previous seasons, and delves deep into questions like “will Jeremy ever get this ‘farming’ thing sorted out?’ ‘Will the locals ever stop hassling him?’ and ‘Will we ever be able to understand Gerald?’ But having grown up in an agricultural setting, I think an... Read more

Cheap Thrills

Last updated on: May 16, 2025 at 2:49 pm By Coyle Neal

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This is the second part of a series on horror’s cultural moment As we continue to think about the rise of horror on the big screen this year (helped along by the non-big screen book Old Country), we can see that one easy cause for horror’s rise is that it is cheap relative to other genres. A few actors, some special effects (mostly practical rather than digital) and you’ve got yourself a movie. As just a quick couple of examples: The Conjuring (2013) cost... Read more

A Light in the City

Last updated on: May 16, 2025 at 11:09 am By Coyle Neal

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When I was growing up in the rural West, Washington DC was the home of the beast out of Revelation (which beast was a little fuzzy at times). Or maybe the dragon, or the whore of Babylon, or Gog or Magog, or any number of other bad guys from the Bible. It was the place where, so talk radio told me, godless atheists were injecting the poison of political liberalism into the veins of the nation and crime was the... Read more

The World is a Horror Story

Last updated on: May 7, 2025 at 12:55 pm By Coyle Neal

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This is the second part of a series on horror’s cultural moment Why is horror apparently ascendant at the box office? Why is Sinners beating, well, everything? This series attempts to answer these questions, and today I want to reflect for a moment on how the world is a horror story. Obviously to say the world is a horror story doesn’t mean nothing good ever happens. It doesn’t mean that the good guys don’t win (spoiler alert: He does). It doesn’t mean there’s... Read more

Mixed Message Harold

Last updated on: May 11, 2025 at 1:13 pm By Coyle Neal

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Harold and the Purple Crayon (Directed by Carlos Saldhana) is an excellent adaptation of the book–at least as excellent as we can possibly expect out of Hollywood in the 2020s. The plot is, well, it’s complex. The “old man” has stopped speaking to Harold, who uses his crayon to draw a door into the real world to search for the old man, only to get into hijinks along the way, eventually getting disillusioned with himself and the darkness of the world... Read more

Living in a Terrifying World

Last updated on: May 4, 2025 at 7:57 am By Coyle Neal

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Hollywood has always kept up a steady trickle of horror films of varying qualities for the public, but it seems that in 2025 that steady trickle is going to turn into a flood. Given the success of Heretic, Nosferatu, and indie-ish films like Terrifier, more than 50 big-budget releases are scheduled for 2025. (Nicely confirming my theory about genre films, btw.) I think this provides a good opportunity for us to reflect on the nature of horror, why it’s having a moment, and... Read more

All creation cries out

Last updated on: April 27, 2025 at 4:51 pm By Coyle Neal

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Children’s books have the option (usually not available to adult or YA novels) of leaning in on visuals and mood, rather than linear plot. This is what happens in Pippa and the Singing Tree by Kristyn Getty and illustrated by P.J. Lynch. This approach obviously has to be done well, as it doesn’t have any action to lean on. Fortunately, Pippa and the Singing Tree lands this nicely. Because there’s no plot there’s not much to spoil–this is an extended (for a children’s book)... Read more

Building for the wrong reasons

Last updated on: April 27, 2025 at 4:39 pm By Coyle Neal

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How do we view ourselves and how does that match up to reality? That’s actually kind of a tricky question, and one which is delicately handled in Sonia and the Biggest Block Tower Ever by Kathryn Butler and illustrated by Samara Hardy. In this short story, Sonia wants to stand out from the other kids. In order to do so, she begins to build a block tower and quickly lets her imagination build it up to the heavens. (I kept expecting it... Read more