Culture
Some fun for your Friday: Mark Pinsky, author of The Gospel According to the Simpsons, has reviewed the newly released
On Christmas Day a few years ago in Dallas, Texas, Socheata Poeuv's parents called a family meeting to tell her that her sisters weren't really her sisters, and her brother was not her full brother. After 25 years of attempting to live a "normal American life," her parents revealed a shocking family secret that would draw them all back to Cambodia, the home they fled and struggled to forget [...]
If you thought socially conscious music in the mainstream was a thing of the past, turn your ears to what Australia is listening to. A song about justice and reconciliation in Australia was the highest new entry in the charts two weeks ago - starting out at #2 on the Australian charts and #2 after Madonna on the digital track charts - and remains in the top 50. As The New York Times reported:
The following is an interview with Abigail Disney, producer of the documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which recently won the award for best documentary feature at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival.
What sparked your interest in wanting to make a documentary about Liberia?
The fact that the newly [...]
During the New York City leg of Brian McLaren's empowering Everything Must Change tour, Jay Bakker and I were asked to give a short reflection based on Brian's talk on "Which Jesus?" When I saw Brian's insightful slideshow presentation that contrasted the empire of Caesar with the kingdom of God, I had a sudden flashback to my Jan. 2007 trip to Israel.
In an [...]
In my ongoing quest for music that can enact positive social change, I came across the Black Gospel Restoration Project, a project spearheaded by Robert Darden, associate professor of journalism at Baylor University. Following is a [...]
Motive Entertainment, the maverick marketers behind The Passion of the Christ and The Chronicles of Narnia bills Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed as" a controversial new satirical documentary [in which] author, former presidential speechwriter, economist, lawyer and actor Ben Stein travels the world, looking to some of the best scientific minds of our [...]
In church one day, my pastor asked us to raise our hands if we believed in what the Bible said. The right answer seemed pretty obvious, and the whole congregation and I raised our hands. Then he asked us to raise our hand if we had read the Bible in its entirety. Touché, Pastor Sean. Touché.
In his latest book, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as [...]
Charlton Heston died this weekend at age 84, following Roy Scheider and Richard Widmark as the latest in a series of powerful cinematic actors to pass away -- although Heston was probably best known to a younger generation as the old guy who walked out of a Michael Moore interview in Bowling for Columbine. His was an ambivalent life
A few of us around Sojourners have been reading award-winning Haitian-born writer Edwidge Danticat since she published her first novel Breath, Eyes, Memory in 1994. Ten years later we were thrilled when she sent us a lovely vignette, In March 2006, Sojourners editorial projects intern Celeste Kennel-Shank wrote a great feature article for us titled "Green Hair, Grey Hair" about the D.C.-based project "We Are Family" started by Mark Anderson. Now, for the first time on the independent screen, one of our articles has inspired a movie! Read the description below about the new film directed by Katrina Taylor and produced by [...]
When I interviewed Phyllis Tickle for Rising from the Ashes: Rethinking Church, she reflected on the seismic changes she sees occurring in contemporary Christianity. "Evangelicalism has lost much of its [...]
When I got an invite to attend a screening of the documentary, Purple State of Mind, I went in expecting to see a blue state v. red state dialogue/debate with some quest to find political common ground.
Wrong.
Instead, I was treated to an honest and humorous dialogue between Craig Detweiler and John Marks, two former college [...]
On Jan. 22, 2008, I headed down to Joe's Pub in New York City to celebrate the launch of Quaker singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer's CD The Geography of Light. Newcomer's lyrics, grounded in her faith formed by a Midwestern sensibility, reminded me of
As I wrote here last week, this year's Oscars, which take place on Sunday night, seem to have caught a cultural mood in cinema that's worthy of reflection
It's true: the religious radio/TV waves are still pretty crowded with 24/7 programming that proclaims a less-than-integral understanding of the Christian gospel and its social implications. But on the bookshelves, thankfully, it's a different story.
Another recent treasure is E.J. Dionne's Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right. I recently participated in an online discussion of the [...]
The Oscars are a little under two weeks from now - with the threat of the writer's strike leading to an unexpected interruption of one of the most surreal nights of the pop culture year now gone. Rich and famous folk slapping each other on the back, handing out gold statuettes for works of art that many of us haven't seen. It has always surprised me how the winning speeches rarely seem to mention the films that have [...]
Last night I finally saw Juno, Roger Ebert's favorite film of 2007 and recipient of four Oscar nominations, which has as its center the story of an unplanned pregnancy and the people affected by it. The protagonist, Juno MacGuff, played by Ellen Page in one of those so-good-she's-either-brilliant-or-really-like-that-in-real-life performances, is a misfit attracted to her male mirror image. Wiser beyond [...]