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The family-friendly movie Dolphin Tale is one of the best films I have seen in a long time. I laughed, I cried, and I didn’t want it to end. The story centers on Winter (a real dolphin who plays herself), who was caught in a crab trap on the Florida coast and rescued by young […]
For reasons that are both understandable and regrettable, apologetics, the science of demonstrating the reasonableness of religious doctrine, is not often mentioned in public life these days. In part, this is due to the demands of charity and prudence, to avoid unnecessary and often acrimonious strife among religious denominations in a nation which has benefited […]
Sometimes our journey is lined with detours. We think we know where God wants us to be but then he sends us in another direction. For Pete Bauer, every time he seemed to draw closer to his goal, he was sent down another road. In the end, however, every detour proved to be a time […]
The recent release of the movie WARRIOR has prompted many different “takes” on the story. I would like to focus on the impact of addiction as portrayed in the film. The Conlon family, having been torn apart by the father’s violent alcoholic behavior, is in a situation that many people, unfortunately, can identify with. Alcoholism […]
So plopping your preschooler in front of the television to gawk at “SpongeBob SquarePants” — a frenetic cartoon featuring scene changes every 11 seconds — impairs his attention span. Who could have guessed? This astonishing revelation comes courtesy of the Pediatrics journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. The journal recently published a study showing […]
Really, how important are the words we use? Here’s what Jesus tells us in Matthew 12:36 & 37: But I tell you that men will have to give account on the day of judgment for every careless word they have spoken. For by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will […]
I was ten years old on November 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas. Forty-eight years later, every detail of what I was doing as the news unfolded on that infamous day remains vividly engraved in my mind’s eye. Every generation seems to have these […]
An interview with Gavin O’Connor director of WARRIOR WARRIOR is a motion picture story about two bitterly estranged brothers who end up fighting in a cage for the mixed martial arts world championship. It is also about their relationship with their father, whom neither can forgive. The violence we see in the cage is visceral. […]
A review of The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion vs. Environmental Religion in Contemporary America & Grizzly Man Who among us has not, in a whimsical or polemical moment, deployed religious metaphors to criticize or belittle a professional or ideological adversary who does not quite see things the way one might wish? That economist at […]
Often I hear Christians complain about the protagonist in a movie because he or she made one or more immoral decisions, and is therefore a poor role model. Another oft heard criticism is that movies are filled with too much on-screen conflict or violence, thus giving audiences the wrong idea about how to resolve problems. […]
For more than a century baseball has been called America’s national pastime, and Major League Baseball is flourishing today. However, in recent decades, football—college and professional—has surpassed baseball in popularity and prominence. For many men and some women, fall weekends and football are synonymous. Both the National Football League and major colleges attract huge audiences […]
Recently, I noticed some social networking posts by a Catholic woman friend about her enjoyment of FOX’s show, “Glee.” This is a woman I respect so I assumed that “Glee” was a wholesome show that any Catholic woman could watch without worry to her conscience. I was enthusiastic in hope that, finally, prime time television […]
The 5th Quarter is a captivating true story of perseverance and as such it is a story for us all. It is a riveting story for anyone who has ever suffered through personal tragedy from which one thought there was no way to recover. It is an emotional story for any parent who has ever […]
Pop quiz — I’ll give you the plot; you name the movie: Up and coming rookie sports star in need of an attitude adjustment accidentally strands himself in a small heartland America town where he runs into a former top performer in his sport who left the limelight years ago but has profound life-changing wisdom […]
The new movie, The Help, based on Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling book by the same name, continues to lead ticket sales at the box office. Both dramatize the extent and tragedy of segregation and discrimination in the South during the early 1960s. Racism affected almost every area of Southern (and many areas of Northern) society before […]
Science and art are not as distant from one another as it might seem. I suggest that one of the reasons “science nerds” also tend to be the “fantasy nerds” is that they are attracted to the same thing: fantastical worlds full of myriad laws and multifarious beings, whose interactions cannot be determined in advance, […]
It’s not very PC to consider yourself a drinker. Alcohol has a bad rap, and its consumption is best kept to a minimum in public and polite society. Think I’m joking? Not too long ago, at a military ball, an official announcement was made that anyone who had had anything at all to drink had […]
Another World Youth Day has come and gone, and with it, all the usual speculation about what it means. Ever since the late Pope John Paul II launched the international faith festival in 1984 by welcoming 300,000 young Catholics to Rome, the chattering classes have struggled to account for its appeal. That struggle continued last […]
In an emotionally charged scene, Tom Conlon, seated at a slot machine, is shouting at his father, Paddy Conlon. With a pleading tone, Paddy is patiently trying to empathize and reconnect with his son. Tom will have none of it, and tells his father it’s too late, lamenting how his dad wasn’t the father he needed […]
When reading Western reports dealing with Islam, one must learn to read between the lines. Many of these reports do state the actual facts; but without providing proper context, Western readers are often left to interpret the information according to their own understandings. One example: the ubiquitous term “sectarian strife” to describe Muslim-Christian clashes in […]
How many unfinished books do you have lying around the house? One, two, maybe even half a dozen? I used to think it was just me, but then someone mentioned her stack of unfinished books and I realized that there were more people “out there” that suffered through the same dreadful, almost embarrassing, book-reading experience […]
Every black person apprehended for robbing stores in a flash mob should have their court hearing not in front of a judge but facing the 30-foot statute of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at his Washington memorial site. Each thief should be asked, “What do you think Dr. King would say to you right now?” […]
WARRIOR’s story is a gripping, won’t-let-you-go study of what it means to fight for noble causes, what it means to love, forgive, and find redemption.
