Pop Culture

  • Thoughts on “Lost” and “The Divine Comedy”

    And so if we’re at all awake, we have this sense of living now at a threshold moment, and the story being told here on Lost projects for us what the stakes are using a technique that interweaves themes from both science and religion, logos and mythos. But at the heart of our story, as…

    read more

  • Disease in Remission

    For the life of me I don't know why anybody serious is obsessing so much about Sarah Palin this week. This piece by Sullivan is simply silly.  As if the future of the nation hinges on exposing what everybody with half a brain already knows.Honestly, who cares and why feed this media frenzy with a

    read more

  • Movie Treatment: The Second Civil War (Updated)

    Treatment for a first episode in bad made-for-TV miniseries: It's 2011. As credits roll in the opening, scenes of lines at soup kitchens, tent cities, a radio newcast voiceover describes a food riot in Miami, survivalists in a firefight with mobile marauders in the Northwest, another voiceover editorializes about the failure of the Obama administration's

    read more

  • May the Force Be with Him

    Just saw this at Balloon Juice.  Parts are laugh out loud funny:

    read more

  • Disembedding and Theosis

    And Jesus said unto him, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath no where to lay his head.   Luke 9:58 I've recently seen two films–"Into the Wild" and  "Beowulf"–that both in their different ways are  stories of human folly and human heroism, but each in

    read more

  • Quote of the Day: Broadcast News

    AARON: What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he’s around? Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail. No…He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and

    read more

  • The Departed

    I saw the film last night and was puzzled. Isn’t this kind of thing getting a little old? I read some reviews, and everyone raved. I acknowledge that the acting–particularly Dicaprio’s–was compelling. A lot of the repartee was entertaining. But is this movie presenting itself as merely an entertainment, or is it tying to make

    read more

  • Alan Moore & Lost

    I haven’t commented on the TV show "Lost" in awhile.  It seems stupid to try to explain it, since there just aren’t enough dots to work with.  But a framework to consider connecting them apparently is to be found in Alan Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen, which I’ve never read, but is supposedly thought by Lost

    read more

  • The Case of Andrew Sullivan

    I was interested to see Slate’s Robert Wright and Andrew Sullivan in this diavlog.  The formerly hawkish Sullivan recants his previous support of the war.  Apparently he explains why in some detail in his book, The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back, which I have only read the reviews of.

    read more

  • Hitler Isn’t George Bush

    If you haven’t seen it, be sure to read this piece on Billy Wilder’s film "Stallag 17" by Chris Kelly at Huffpost.  Please read the whole thing, but for the impatient among you, here’s the nub: The prisoners get mail from home. They get visits from the Red Cross. They aren’t even kept in cages.

    read more