It’s Good Friday, the day Christians commemorate Jesus’ crucifixion and death. It’s a strange day to call “good.” Jesus’ death was the stuff of horror movies, and the Bible doesn’t spare us the details. Unflinching, it forces us to look toward Golgotha, the place of the skull, and watch as His hands and feet are nailed to a cross. For hours, He suffers. He cries out. And then, when the world was enveloped in darkness, He dies. The Crucifixion been... Read more
I just got a box of books Friday. Not just of any book, but my new book—Burning Bush 2.0: How Pop Culture Replaced the Prophet. Abingdon Press, my publisher, won’t be officially releasing it for another few weeks, so I guess that’s one advantage of writing the thing. Early copies. I’d like to think the book is a fun, fascinating, whirlwind trip through the world of popular entertainment, offering lots of quick-hit spiritual observations on everything from The Walking Dead and The Hunger... Read more
The X-Files is coming back to the network for a six-episode run. It’ll reunite David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, and creator Chris Carter will continue to head the show. I haven’t heard when it’ll air, but production will begin this summer. “I think of it as a 13-year commercial break,” Carter told Variety. The news leaves me feeling like this: Now, I’m not so much an X-Phile that I suffered through the Duchovny-scarce final seasons or wrote obsessive Mulder/Scully-themed romances,... Read more
Grace is a strange thing. I get it in concept. Christianity’s all about grace and forgiveness: Together, the words are mentioned in the New Testament about 160 times (give or take a few, depending on the translation). I think most of us know how important it is to forgive, and so we try to do it as much as we’re able. But when it comes to forgiving ourselves … that can be a lot more difficult. At least it can... Read more
Yeah, it was only a matter of time before this happened. Nothing like an Avengers/Friends intro mashup to get me pumped to see The Avengers: Age of Ultron come May. ‘Course, being an unapologetic superhero fan, it doesn’t take much. But coming on the heels of watching some of the Jesus-centric programs coming to television (A.D. on NBC and Killing Jesus on the National Geographic channel), it also reminded me that the Avengers we see here, and the apostles we read... Read more
There is a move afoot to have G. K. Chesterton canonized as a Catholic saint. There’s a certain irony in this push to sainthood, given the man’s less-than-saintly appetites. He sometimes drank heavily (he allegedly joked that “one pint is enough, two pints is one too many, three pints isn’t half enough”), smoked heavily and ate heavily. Indeed, he weighed so much at the time of his death in 1936 that, when they put him in his coffin, it had... Read more
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a little piece on Netflix’ House of Cards and Fox’s Last Man On Earth. I had reviewed an episode of each for Plugged In, and both episodes kinda got religious on me. Weird, I thought. Not often television engages with faith so explicitly. What’re the chances? Pretty good, in retrospect. This March, television’s been on a religious jag. Paige Jennings, daughter of Soviet spies Philip and Elizabeth, got baptized on the March 4... Read more
Full disclosure: I missed the end of Cinderella. It wasn’t my fault. I went to a screening up in Denver and watched a good chunk of the movie before the fire alarm went off, sending us—a theater full of moms, kids and one slightly cranky movie reviewer—outside. Turns out there wasn’t a fire, but it didn’t matter: No one could turn off the accompanying strobe lights, and we all know that fairy-tale balls and blinding, Saturday Night Live disco lights... Read more
I’m in the business of watching movies. And if there’s anything I like more than a good movie, it’s a bad movie. Now, I’m not talking about bad as in “salacious and problematic” bad. I’m just talking bad. As a kid, my best friend and I would rent schlocky horror movies and make fun of them all the way through. And when that proved to be too much work, my sister introduced me to Mystery Science Theater 3000, cementing a... Read more
What’s a great way to make a hit movie or miniseries? Base it on a bestselling book. It worked pretty well for Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen and even Christian Grey. But the Bible? Even with the might of Hollywood heavyweight Mark Burnett (Survivor, The Voice, Shark Tank) and his wife, actress Roma Downey (Touched By an Angel) behind it, it’s not an easy sell. A lot of folks thought that this entertainment power couple lost their marbles when they... Read more
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