Planes, Trains and Automobiles has been described as the quintessential Thanksgiving movie, even though the turkey barely gets five seconds of screentime. Perhaps it owes its enduring appeal to the very fact that it flips the holiday movie formula on its head. Neal Page wants very much to be home with his family, yet he spends all but the last few minutes of the movie with a complete stranger. Glimpses of the homecoming feast are held out as a tease in… Read more
November 22, 2018
What a Thanksgiving Classic Taught Me About Grace
November 22, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly
4 Comments
November 15, 2018
The Gods We Make Will Fail Us
November 15, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly
6 Comments
Last weekend’s plans did not include having a Twitter chat with Eric Weinstein about God. Nevertheless, that was a thing that happened last weekend. But first, I should explain who Eric Weinstein is. The very short version: Eric Weinstein is a mathematician, a physicist, an economist, and the guy who manages Peter Thiel’s money. Some of his side projects have included becoming an immigration expert, working to develop a new unifying theory, and most recently, christening the Intellectual Dark Web…. Read more
November 11, 2018
A Lament for Armistice Day, 2018
November 11, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly
4 Comments
Today marks the 100th Anniversary of Armistice Day: November 11th, 1918. Perhaps it’s just me, but I haven’t seen a surplus of retrospective pieces about World War I this year, despite its being the centennial of the war’s end. Maybe this is because we here in America have never remembered the first Great War like Britain and Europe remembered it. We contributed, certainly. We had a brush with the war. But we crossed the ocean to meet the war. The… Read more
November 2, 2018
5 Rules for Christian Voters On Election Day
November 2, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly
79 Comments
In anticipation of Election Day 2018, I am blowing the dust off an old article I wrote for Summit Ministries in the spring of 2016. Funnily enough, the “five rules” I came up with then still seem pretty applicable today (except at the time I called them “five principles,” but post-Jordan Peterson any article of this sort can’t not be called “X Rules For…”) So without further ado, here are my five rules for voting. 1. Know where your identity lies…. Read more
October 29, 2018
To Pittsburgh, And To Life
October 29, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly
1 Comment
Others have already written at greater length than I will be able to muster about the Pittsburgh shooting, the largest anti-Semitic mass murder in U. S. history. I especially recommend that everyone go read Bari Weiss’s stirring tribute, if they have not done so already. A more fitting homage to Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood could not have been penned in this moment. When I encounter overwhelmingly sad news, bits of music tend to flood to mind. The news out of Pittsburgh… Read more
October 26, 2018
Creationism is Bigger Than the Age of the Earth Question
October 26, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly
185 Comments
It’s not every day that you get to see Ken Ham pick a fight with Matt Walsh, but it happened this week, after the conservative firebrand posted a video explaining why he rejects young Earth creationism. Walsh states emphatically that the evidence has spoken loudly across multiple disciplines, that this is not a hill anybody should be dying on, and that evangelical Christians are damaging the impact of their witness by making it so. This was a follow-up to a… Read more
October 19, 2018
First Man is NASA’s American Sniper
October 19, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly
0 Comments
Last weekend was not a soaring opening weekend for Neil Armstrong biopic First Man. Bringing in about 16 million, it lagged behind films like Venom and A Star is Born, which are vying for portions of First Man’s already limited target audience. Some have wondered whether the film was additionally hurt by the controversy swirling around the presence of the American flag at the moon landing. (In fact, it does show the flag on the moon, but it does not show the moment when the flag… Read more
October 16, 2018
Jordan Peterson Might Leave Twitter, But I Hope He Stays
October 16, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly
3 Comments
Twitter is a fickle creature. You can ride it well, if you keep a good seat. But sometimes it can be a bumpy ride. Even those of us with followers in the four or three-digit range (sniff) can attest to this. Now amplify that by a few orders of magnitude, and you’ll have some sense of what Jordan Peterson’s week has been like. And all it took was one tweet: “If confirmed Kavanaugh should step down.” People Being Upset With… Read more
October 12, 2018
Oh Sinners, Let’s Go Down
October 12, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly
2 Comments
Did you see this lovely story of a father and daughter who were recently baptized together in a Virginia jail? Remarkable thing. Unbeknownst to each other, both were serving time on drug charges and joined the men’s and women’s Bible studies respectively. Eight women and three men made the choice to be baptized on the same day. That was when someone put the pieces together and realized the father and daughter were, indeed, father and daughter. The girl is pregnant too…. Read more
October 8, 2018
#MeToo, Borders, and the Tyranny of Empathy
October 8, 2018 By Esther O’Reilly
109 Comments
The Brett Kavanaugh circus is officially over. Our news and social media feeds can now gradually revert back to their usual levels of hysteria and toxicity—still high, but please God, not quite this high, thank you. Yet even while life in 2018 returns to as close to normal as life in 2018 can be, the memory of these last few weeks will fester in the American mind for a long time to come. For ideologues on the left, Kavanaugh’s confirmation… Read more
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