David Lowery’s superb supernatural drama offers a God’s-eye perspective on the intimate and the infinite. Surfaces turn, find their places. In time, The rhythm could not be simpler. —David Wright, "Altar Piece" The desire to leave a record of ourselves is among the most reliable of human impulses. From cave paintings to monuments to grave …
Pulitzer Prize–winner Frances FitzGerald looks at the long history behind evangelical political activism. There’s a familiar story about evangelical political activism that begins with the 1960s. The country’s mores were changing rapidly, and evangelicals, alarmed by a retreat from traditional values, awoke from decades of political slumber and charged back into the arena, launching the …
How the makers (and watchers) of movies are engaged in a kind of prayer. We had been married only a month the first time I showed my wife Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock’s psycho-drama about a man so obsessed with a dead woman that he remakes another woman in the dead woman’s image. This was perhaps the …
I saw an American soldier reading his Bible, and I wanted to know more. I grew up in Iraq as the third oldest of eight siblings. My family was untraditional. My mom was Muslim, and my dad was Catholic. They didn’t force any religion on their children, in part because they didn’t take religion very …
Twenty years after his dating bestseller, he reconsiders its controversial arguments. We’ve hit the 20-year anniversary of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, a book that’s provoked a reaction through the decades for its take on young romantic relationships. Back in 2001, one author wrote for CT, “Joshua Harris hasn't made my life any easier. In fact, …
Melodic nü-metal "I want to heal/I want to feel what I thought was never real/I want to let go of the pain I've held so long/(Erase all the pain 'til it's gone)/I want to heal/I want to feel like I'm close to something real/I want to find something I've wanted all along/Somewhere I belong" — …
Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon’s fresh take on the genre is a love poem, a laugh fest—and a refreshing ode to the beauty of family. This is the year of the second-generation immigrant story, and I am here for it. Between Aziz Ansari’s Master of None season 2, Hasan Minhaj’s Netflix comedy special Homecoming …
True transformation takes focus, not capricious compassion. “Many people come here and take pictures,” the elder told me as he leaned on his walking stick, his slender frame swathed in heavy cloth despite the heat. “Then they go away and never help.” This is the moment that haunts me from my recent visit to Turkana, …
Peter Parker has finally entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe—but he can’t join the Avengers until he practices the heroic discipline of humility. The latest superhero movie can sometimes feel like the last one, with over-quippy dialogue and shallow themes—especially if it’s one of a few recent Marvel Cinematic Universe films. Not so, however, with Spider-Man: …
Latino congregations are launching their own international partnerships to support ministries and churches in their homelands. The knocking roused Valentin Salamanca from bed around 4 a.m. He was not sleeping anyway. He feared they would come, and now they had. Valentin walked a few steps from his bedroom and opened the front door to a …