Latest Posts

February 14, 2023

Women Talking Will Definitely Have You Talking

The film Women Talking opens with what amounts to a warning: “This is an act of female imagination.” That’s because it’s not actually a telling of the events on which it is based, the horrific story of rape and abuse of more than 130 people in a small Bolivian Mennonite community called Manitoba between 2005 and 2009. Continue Reading...
February 10, 2023

Why the British Evangelical Revival Still Matters

In the middle decades of the 18th century, a powerful spiritual movement swept through much of North America and Great Britain, as well as some parts of northern Europe. This evangelical revival (or, in North America, the Great Awakening) transformed not only individual believers but culture and society as well, and produced some extraordinary personalities, people used mightily by God. Continue Reading...
February 07, 2023

Jimmy Lai Among Hong Kongers Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai has lost a great deal. From his news outlet, Next Digital, to his rights as a citizen of Hong Kong, 75-year-old Lai now sits in a prison cell for his pro-democracy activities and may spend the rest of his life in prison under the Chinese Communist Party’s National Security crackdown on dissent of any kind. Continue Reading...
February 07, 2023

Top Gun: Maverick: Our America Is Back

The surprise hit of 2022 was Top Gun: Maverick, a man and machine heroic picture, sentimental and nostalgic, the sort of thing Hollywood just doesn’t do anymore. At first glance it seemed way too old-fashioned, yet it made more than $700 million in America and just a bit more than that in the rest of the world, without even opening in China. Continue Reading...
February 02, 2023

MAID in Canada

“You know what your life is worth to you. And mine is worthless,” said Mitchell Tremblay, a 40-year-old Canadian man battling severe mental illness and intent on using his country’s medical suicide program to end his life as soon as possible. Continue Reading...
February 01, 2023

What Chinese and American Schools Can Learn from Each Other

In a recent essay for the New York Times, American fashion designer Heather Kaye writes about raising her daughters in Shanghai and sending them to the Chinese public schools. Far from finding the schools backward and totalitarian, she expresses profound gratitude for the experience: “As an American parent in China, I learned to appreciate the strong sense of shared values and of people connected as a nation.” Continue Reading...
January 31, 2023

The Success of Avatar Is Nothing to Celebrate

The biggest box office success in cinema history, strictly in dollars taken in, is Avatar, the 2009 movie that made 3D a technology audiences would finally flock to. The movie made some $785 million in America, more than another $2 billion in the rest of the world, adding up to about $2.9 billion. Continue Reading...