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Touchdown Jesus
I was in the middle of writing something completely different until the opening of college football season snuck up on me and Notre Dame was on a nationally televised opener over the Labor Day weekend....
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The nuns who prove the 'The Handmaid's Tale' wrong
The Hulu series “The Handmaid’s Tale” has won many awards and high praise from all the right kind of people. This story of a dystopian world where religious fanaticism reigns supreme and women are...
View ArticleThere’s no photoshopping Scripture
People used to be cautioned about not believing everything they read in a newspaper. Newspapers … you remember those things? For the uninitiated, newspapers were these bundles delivered to people’s...
View ArticleMother Nature’s son
Sandra’s story is a lot like other stories of journeys to the United States. Born in Germany, raised in Brazil, Sandra lived a very hard life. Shuffled from one place to the next, had a child taken...
View ArticleBeatlemania … again
Congratulations to John, Paul, George, and Ringo. They made it! Their album “Abbey Road” has reached No. 1 on the British pop music charts. That is not a headline from 1969 but one taken off the...
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Pop culture, meet forgiveness
Guilty pleasures still make us guilty. The Liam Neeson “Taken” franchise is such a form of entertainment I have dabbled in. Guilty. From the rash of sequels at least I’m not alone. Why do movies like...
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Fighting the mainstream culture in ancient Egypt and today
A few days ago, I attended the gala for the Pregnancy Counseling Center of Mission Hills at the Ronald Reagan Library. I felt so countercultural and I felt humbled to be in the presence of so many men...
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Rejecting the Laurel Canyon culture
I just sat down and watched the documentary “Echo in the Canyon” on Netflix. It’s the tale of the remarkable point in time when mid-1960s Laurel Canyon seemed to be the moral equivalent of a Paris...
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The value of a forged painting
There’s an old line from a distant movie where a character comments on the fact that Vincent Van Gogh never sold a painting in his life. I think his brother Theo may have bought a couple, though, out...
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Neighborhood Christianity, Mr. Rogers style
I never watched much of “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood,” but with the recent documentary and the upcoming major bio film about him starring Tom Hanks I kind of wish I had. For it seems Fred Rogers was one...
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In praise of the eternal partnership
If a recent article where Emma Watson, star of the blockbuster Harry Potter film franchise, is any indication, it appears that popular culture is in the throes of another mangling of both the English...
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Modern echoes of ancient Rome’s pagan model
Since I have a tendency to hark back to bygone ages of popular culture, especially when it comes to movies and television, the fact that I’m writing about a TV series that was on HBO in 2005 and 2007...
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Everyday morality and real police work in ‘Maigret’
It can sometimes feel like streaming upstream when I click on one of the services I have, looking for something to watch. I almost put myself into a trance by clicking through one movie or television...
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Has the world gone bananas?
As political and cultural commentator P.J. O’Rourke said, “Like most sensible people, you probably lost interest in modern art about the time that Julian Schnabel was painting broken pieces of the...
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The ‘superhuman saint’ problem
I probably shouldn’t throw in on this as I really don’t have a dog in the fight. I am not a subject of the United Kingdom, I am of Irish, not English, descent, and I am a practicing (and will continue...
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A cultural check-in at the Golden Globes
The “holidays” are over, so that means it’s awards season, and for some unfathomable reason I found myself watching the Golden Globe Awards show Jan. 5. I think it had to do with some interesting...
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The return of the Hollywood heroes
Maybe somebody has spiked the designer water in Hollywood lately, but despite the industrial-strength levels of self-righteousness, licentiousness, and overall decadent imprinting going on, this...
View ArticleFinding human dignity in BBC TV
I have a new television addiction. This one does not involve former high school chemistry teachers who have become drug kingpins. There are no terrorists to pursue in this television series, no great...
View ArticleLooking beyond the Dodgers’ cheating pain
The late and equally parts funny and offensive comedian George Carlin had a great routine about the difference between baseball and football. I can do it no justice trying to recreate his pitch,...
View ArticleFinding hope in old-made-new television
Albert Einstein burst upon the world’s stage when he presented his thesis on the relativity of time. You would think that concept alone would have been enough to keep mankind busy for the next 1,000...
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