Left Behind as Evangelical Pornography
For most readers who are not evangelical Christians (and for many of us who are), the representation of reality in the Left Behind series can come across as oddly distorted.
Category: Essays
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Exporting Love, Exporting Hate
One of the more striking contrasts between Rocky's mission and IHOP's is that his orphans have names.
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For Better or Until Something Better Comes Along
Love is the secular American religion. It is the consideration around which all decisions are made and by which all questionable decisions are justified. Its pursuit is the pursuit of happiness, its attainment the validation of whatever process is used to achieve it.
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Emma, Merida, and the Female Bildungsroman
In his critical reception history for the novel in the Bedford edition, Alistair Duckworth notes that "feminist voices" were seldom heard championing Austen prior to the 1970s
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The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan, 2012)
As I've acknowledged elsewhere, the Batman of this series of films is not the same character/hero I grew up with, and that complicates my reactions, making it harder (though, I hope, not impossible) to separate my disappointment from my judgment. That's not all of it, though, or I should have liked Rises more than The Dark Knight, and I'm not sure I did (even if I did judge it a better film).
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Love Free or Die (Alston, 2012)
Nobody has ever hated me the way Christians have hated me.
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Courageous (Kendrick,2011)
I thought I was going to get away without having to write anything about Alex Kendrick's Courageous, a film which is admittedly hard for me to be fair to at least in part because I'm not really the intended audience.
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Fish Out of Water (Dickens, 2010)
I suppose a Christian corollary would be that to truly make a Biblical argument, you must first develop a systematic theology.
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Family Affair (Colvard, 2010)
One in four women over the age of eighteen has experienced some form of sexual abuse.