At the beginning of the final episode of Derry Girls, the British Channel 4 TV series that ran for three seasons and that was also carried by Netflix in the U.S., Continue Reading...
With the December 31 passing of Pope Benedict XVI, the Catholic Church, Christianity, and the world lost one of the most significant and insightful minds of the last century. Certainly, within the Church, Joseph Ratzinger was among the most influential and esteemed theologians of the second half of the 20th century, all the way through his pontificate in the early 21st, to include the period of the Second Vatican Council, to which he was an important adviser. Continue Reading...
On August 26, 2021, Stuart Scheller posted a video on LinkedIn and Facebook in which he strongly criticized senior U.S. military and civilian leaders for the embarrassing way in which the country had withdrawn forces from Afghanistan in the preceding days. Continue Reading...
In a cultural landscape that is often hostile—or at best indifferent—to religion, a popular and widely lauded novel whose plot focuses not only on matters of faith but also a main character whose worldview and identity is shaped entirely by his Catholicism is a rare occurrence. Continue Reading...
The idea of personal identity and sentience in artificial intelligences (AI) is not exactly new territory for the science fiction genre: from Neuromancer to Westworld, writers frequently contemplate the ideas of agency and moral status in close-to-human, artificially engineered agents and environments. Continue Reading...
For regular listeners of the Triggernometry YouTube podcast, much of the content and tone of co-host Konstantin Kisin’s just-published nonfiction book, An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West, will come as no surprise. Continue Reading...
Near the beginning of the Netflix series Midnight Mass, released in late 2021, an Ash Wednesday service is faithfully shown, complete with a young priest’s effective and moving sermon, explaining the ashes as “a smudge of death, of ash, of sin—for repentance—because of where this is all heading, which is Easter. Continue Reading...