The final episode of National Geographic’s The Story of God series (airing May 8), “The Power of Miracles,” suggests how tricky it is to determine what really constitutes divine intervention. We meet a man who survived a 47-story drop from a skyscraper—but the same fall claimed the life of his brother. Host Morgan Freeman talks with a scientist who tells us that some of what we think are “miracles” are simply matters of random chance. He draws six cards from... Read more
Bono, lead singer for U2, and Eugene Peterson, author of The Message contemporary Bible translation, recently spent some time together at Peterson’s Montana home to discuss the Psalms—along with some cameras courtesy the Fuller Seminary. It’s a fascinating talk. Take a look: “They’re not pretty,” Peterson says about the Psalms. “They’re not nice.” Bono loves the Psalms because of their “brutal honesty.” “That’s what God wants from you,” he says. “The truth. The way, the truth. And that truthfulness—know the... Read more
My favorite scene in “Evil,” the May 1 episode from National Geographic’s series The Story of God, involves a bunch of 6-year-olds. The kids are part of an experiment. They’re split into two groups and tasked with the same job: Each child will stand in an empty room and throw Velcro balls at a cloth dartboard, with the winner receiving a fabulous (but unnamed) prize. Simple enough, right? But this contest has a few rules attached to it. One, the... Read more
Amongst all the remarkable items in the Smithsonian’s collections—from the Hope Diamond to the Spirit of St. Louis, from Ben Franklin’s cane to Abe Lincoln’s hat—visitors might run across a modest, yellowed hymnal. It doesn’t look particularly impressive. But the hands which held it belong to the same person who will reportedly replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill: Harriet Tubman. The hymnal was one of Tubman’s dearest possessions, even though historians suspect she couldn’t even read it. It’s a... Read more
In National Geographic’s April 24 episode of The Story of God, “Creation,” host Morgan Freeman explores the supposed divide between faith and science—and gives us a hint of one of the reasons why, perhaps, he drifted away from his own traditional Christian upbringing. Freeman goes back to his old church in Mississippi and shares that he found Christianity’s own creation story to be a “profound mystery.” He stresses the apparent disparity between the Big Bang Theory—how most scientists currently think... Read more
In an episode NBC’s Friends—“The One Where Phoebe Hates PBS”—sage theosophist Joey Tribbiani argues that there is no such thing as a selfless act of charity. Good deeds inherently make the good-deeder feel good, “so that makes it selfish.” I thought about that episode while watching the quirky, delightful English comedy The Lady in the Van (coming out on DVD and Blu-Ray April 19). If there was ever a good deed to feel bad about, it might be helping the... Read more
The definitive scene in That Dragon, Cancer, is its most frustrating. I’m in a hospital room. My “son,” Joel, is crying. And the objective … what is the objective? To make him stop crying? To make him feel better? To wait for the doctor? In most video games, we know what we’re supposed to be doing. We’ve gotta kill Alduin or stop the Joker or take the checkered flag. But there’s no fold-out menu to tell me what to do,... Read more
“What is your concept of God?” I was in high school when I was first asked this question, eating French fries at 2 a.m. with some of my friends. I was hanging with a pretty eclectic crowd that evening—wanna-be hippies and struggling agnostics and one guy who swore he could bend spoons with his mind (or he would be able to, with practice). I think I was the only traditional Christian in the bunch. But ironically, perhaps I was the... Read more
When I was a boy, the first real book of the Bible I read on my own wasn’t Genesis or John or Romans. It was Revelations. It sounds odd, I know, but I’d been to Sunday School plenty. I knew my Bible stories. I knew Jesus was great. And I thought that most of the Bible was made, pretty much, of everything I already thought I knew—only with a lot more confusing words like “thy” and “thou.” But Revelations was... Read more
God’s Not Dead 2, the predictably named sequel to 2014’s surprise hit God’s Not Dead, is a better movie than the first. It again suggests that Christian movies—even at their most Christian-y—are getting better. Many of the points the movie makes are valid. And I suspect that, for many Christians, this’ll be their favorite movie of the year. But for me, this film fell short. Simply put: I think it’s hard to argue people into heaven. God’s Not Dead 2... Read more
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