In 2021, for the first time in two decades of Gallup polling, America’s social ideology shifted. For the first time in two decades of Gallup polling, social liberals outnumbered their socially conservative counterparts. Continue Reading...
Latest Posts
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...
January 26, 2023
The Chaplain of Kyiv: From Russian Torture to Ukrainian Freedom
Thirty-five-year-old Viktor Cherniivaskyi is no stranger to pain. In August 2014, he was helping citizens escape a militarized zone, the product of mass Ukrainian protests, the ousting of Ukraine’s president, and the Russian annexation of Crimea. Continue Reading...
January 25, 2023
A Bond for All Seasons
As the producers of the venerable James Bond franchise come to ponder how best to refurbish their hero for the uncertain times ahead—a woman, perhaps, and/or a person of color?—a small but persistent debate among film buffs continues to address the chicken-and-egg dilemma of which came first: Have the actors successively playing Bond over the past 60-plus years consciously fine-tuned their performance in response to all the eddies in fashion and culture, or have they been ahead of the curve in defining the limits of an acceptable sort of male behavior for the rest of us to emulate? Continue Reading...
January 24, 2023
A Priest for People with Problems
Being fully human is complicated. Having a foot in both the material and spiritual worlds and with an originally good but fallen nature, our thoughts, motivations, and desires often come into conflict, and we don’t always choose what is best for us. Continue Reading...
January 19, 2023
Biblical Critical Theory and Other Errors
If a Christian scholar has figured out a way to wrestle with critical theory through a biblical lens, that would be an important book. Unfortunately, Christopher Watkin’s Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture is mistitled. Continue Reading...
