Greetings, Mr. Sheen. You don’t know me, and you probably have never heard of our blog site here, but if I could have a few minutes of your time, I’d appreciate it. I have followed your career’on and off’since your early days working with Oliver Stone. I have a vivid memory of being deeply moved...
Tag: Gospel Spam
“Jurassic World:” A Sequel That Knows It’s a Sequel
One of my vivid movie-going memories comes from June 1993 when I saw Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park on opening night. 22 years ago, nobody had ever seen a computer-generated dinosaur, much less a whole mess of them. They were vivid and life-like. They convincingly interacted with human actors. They even seamlessly melded with full-scale animatronic...
Audacity: The Audacity of Love
Anyone who has read my reviews of Christian films knows that generally, I’m not a fan. The writing is usually very bad, the acting is often even worse, and they usually look (and sound) like they were shot in a church gymnasium. They are often sappy, unrealistic, and so obviously evangelistic that they shouldn’t really...
Street Preaching 2.0: Thank God for Ray Comfort
If anyone ever writes the history of open-air preaching in the 21st century, they will be writing about the influence of Ray Comfort and his television show, The Way of the Master. Many of the leaders in the present day open-air preaching sub-culture learned about open-air by watching that television program and by attending either...
“Tomorrowland:” Disney Goes Postmillennial
The Hunger Games. Mad Max: Fury Road. Left Behind. Wait, Left Behind? What’s a Christian work of fiction doing among those secular entertainments? Well, they all have one overriding theme: Pessimism. In The Hunger Games the world ends and afterward we all end up hunting and killing each other. In Mad Max: Fury Road the...
Burned Over? Revivalism And Its Effects On The Local Church
The Erie Canal and Evangelicalism Most students of church history and sound theology have opinions on what has brought about the current spiritual malaise in evangelicalism. I once heard a fellow speaker at an evangelism conference state that the modern church has not recovered from the 19th century as a whole. I don’t think I...
Focus on the Fantasy: How “Plugged In” Has Become Unplugged
Have you heard? Focus on the Family is now reviewing’pornography. A pornographic film based upon a pornographic book is about to be released to theaters nationwide, and Focus on the Family is reviewing it so that you’dear Christian’can know whether or not you should go and watch pornography. That’s right, a popular evangelical Christian ministry...
How To Love The Fool: “Debating Dillahunty”
There’s a principle present in the new documentary Debating Dillahunty that can be encapsulated in the famous song from the Disney classic Mary Poppins: A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. In Debating Dillahunty, the medicine is the gospel of Jesus Christ and the sugar is Sye Ten Bruggencate. Anybody who is even...
“The Battle of the Five Armies” Ends The Hobbit With An Exclamation Point
Peter Jackson so placed his indelible artistic stamp on his Lord of the Rings trilogy that when he decided to film the first Middle-Earth book, The Hobbit, comparisons were inevitable. The books themselves don’t invite such comparisons; J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit before The Lord of the Rings. However, in Movie-Land, prequels are the new...
“The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1:” An Excellent Half-Movie
When adapting a trilogy of books, it probably doesn’t make much sense to make four movies. The final book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was split up into two movies, and both movies taken together are much more successful than their individual parts. Since Mockingjay, Part 2 is still...