Category Archives: Media Reviews

A Jesus Story Without the Cheese

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As our family gets older, it becomes harder and harder to find a movie that will both enlighten and entertain a vast range of ages without scandalizing the younger ones (we currently range from ages 7-18). When it became clear that almost everyone would be home this Friday evening, I made an announcement that I often make when I am trying to widen the cultural horizons of our children, reduce the number of individual screens, and make watching more communal. I said, “I want to show you all a movie together, and I want you to give it 30 minutes before you decide you want to see something else.” The 30 minute rule is for us the test of a universally good family flick. The Jesus Revolution passed this test for all but the seven year old. Available now to rent or buy through Amazon Prime, this film will be worth every minute of your family’s time.

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The Many Other Things that Jesus Did

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And there are also many other things that Jesus did, which if they were written one by one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. Amen.

John 21:25

The beloved disciple and evangelist John teases us with these words toward the end of his very mystical narrative. But beyond teasing us into writing yet one more book about our Lord and Master, I believe St. John’s words serve as a kind of license to create and imagine contexts and conversations beyond the true Gospel account, while remaining faithful to the original canon of revelation. Dallas Jenkins’ series The Chosen, now in its third season at Angel Studios, continues to be that incredible re-imagining.

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Creatively Faithful Theology

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Monday, November 28, 2022
First Day of the Nativity Fast
Commencement of Advent in the Orthodox Church

Growing up, I was taught many things about the Christian faith that did not seem exactly right. One puerile notion that was especially debilitating was this idea that fidelity to tradition was somehow antithetical to the more romantic adventure of discerning revival, i.e., what God is doing NOW, in our own day and age. According to this notion, the divine mercies that are “new every morning” have to make a clean break with what came before, and the Christian revolution should break with the old, worn out traditions as well.

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Highly Recommended Podcasts

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Happy Harvest to all our readers! As many of you know, our family likes to recommend good, wholesome, and inspiring media through our yearly lists that come out every January and are archived here. One area of media that we have been into lately and one I may add as a category is podcasts. For those of you that spend a good deal of time in the car and just do not have time to read print media, subscribing to multiple podcasts can be a good way to stay in touch with current news, monitor popular cultural trends, and most importantly, deepen your relationship with the Creator of the Universe.

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Will You Be a Pilgrim?

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Hooray! Another school year has begun and our family is again at it with what I consider the best way (short of divine services) to learn truth, beauty, and goodness. Today we started rehearsals for a December Performance of a show called Celestial City about the life of John Bunyan and his great spiritual classic Pilgrim’s Progress. Tickets are now available here for December 2022 shows.

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Highway to the Danger Zone!

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Dear Readers, Sorry I have been away for so long. I usually try to post at least one thing a month. Having an older family makes us all very busy.

Glad to say I saw the new Top Gun film in the theatre yesterday. Cannot say it will appeal to all audiences, but it brought this GenXer many nostalgic moments and some surprisingly fresh content. Only criticism I might level is that the soundtrack was slightly better in the original, although this reboot develops the characters much better. The producer and company was correct to save this blockbuster originally slated for 2020 for a post-pandemic release. It is truly something worth seeing on the big screen. The audience we saw it with last night gave a slight applause at the end which I have rarely heard from an American audience.

Deep and Sincere Conversation with God

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Am reading a fantastic book for Lent by a woman who serves in ministry in the Anglican Church in their home parish in Pittsburgh, PA. She is another C.S. Lewis in her ability to take complex spiritual experiences and capture them with poignant and contemporary images. Her personal honesty and vulnerability make the work eminently readable and relatable. Tish Harrison Warren is author of Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep. It is half spiritual memoir (my favorite genre of writing at this time of my life) and half prayer manual. The structure is based on the Compline service in the Book of Common Prayer, a service the author has grown particularly drawn to and even dependent upon.

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A Spiritual Underdog

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God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.

The Four Spiritual Laws

Thus begins a classic tract of a witnessing Christian Church in which I was raised. A tract is a small pamphlet for people in a hurry to remind them in their busyness of their eternal destiny and worth in the eyes of Almighty God. I saw a movie tonight that epitomizes this message through the narrative of an unlikely football hero, a washed up old timer who missed his one chance to play pro only to claw, scrape and grind his way back into the contest. American Underdog about the story of St. Louis Ram’s quarterback Kurt Warner will leave you overcome with hope.

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Lost Sheep from a Fallen Megachurch

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Have really been sinking my teeth into podcasting these past several years. On one Orthodox Christian podcast I listen to, I heard a review of another podcast that really piqued my interest in a deep and personal way. I recently finished this long form journalism project from Christianity Today entitled The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. Man, did it hit several nerves inside of me! First, it strikes me as an effort to talk about things in the modern Protestant Evangelical Church that most have never talked about, at least not publicly. This will be my attempt to blog about this seminal church planting movement started and hosted by my own Generation X.

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Redeeming the Educated Fool

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Clean Tuesday of First Week of Great Lent

“Cuz you can go to your college and you can go to your school. If you ain’t got Jesus you’re just an educated fool and that’s all.”

Denomination Blues by the 77’s

I love spiritual memoirs. Seems like I am always finishing one right before the start of Great Lent. This year is no exception as I polished off Eric Metaxas‘ very witty and inspiring story of his coming to Jesus called A Fish Out of Water. There is so much in this book I identify with. A son of two immigrants from the vastly different countries of Germany and Greece, Eric always had difficulty fitting in wherever he went. As an intellectual phenom, he was promoted a grade early on which added to his awkwardness since he was almost always the youngest in his age group. After he achieved his dream of graduating from Yale, he hunted about searching for life’s deeper purpose waiting to be “discovered” for the brilliant person he thought himself to be. In the end, a coworker from a dead end corporate job introduces him to Jesus and the idea that God is not just some remote being but a Person interested in having a relationship with him.

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