Where Christianity intersects with politics, culture, and entertainment.
A biographer said that the director, at the end of his life, shunned religion. Not true. I was there. I remember as a young boy watching the black-and-white "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" on TV and being enthralled from the start by the simple nine-stroke line-drawing caricature of the famed movie director's rotund profile. The mischievous theme…
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Last week, The Wall Street Journal ran a photograph of the damage the monster storm Sandy had inflicted on the Breezy Point neighborhood of Queens, N.Y. This beachfront community had been hit hard by air, water and fire, leaving the fourth classic Greek element, earth, strewn with rubble and ashes. The front-page photo, reproduced five…
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Since the Rev. Sun Myung Moon died this week, obituaries have described a megalomaniacal tax-evader. The messianic leader of his own Unification Church, he ran a sizable corporate empire and dabbled extensively in Korean and American politics. If he still registers on the public consciousness, it is as a weird preacher who performed mass weddings.…
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They came in droves — war veterans and far-right politicians, Hussars on horseback and guardsmen in camouflage. About 1,000 people gathered in this village over the weekend to unveil a bronze bust of Admiral Miklos Horthy, Hungary's ruler between 1920 and 1944. Most Hungarians view Horthy as an authoritarian who dragged Hungary into a disastrous…
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It’s only been part of the Pledge of Allegiance since 1954, but the phrase “under God” has been the subject of a fair number of lawsuits, including new one in which the judge declared that it is not a “religious truth.” S. Jane Haggerty, a Superior Court judge in Massachusetts, rejected a lawsuit form an…
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If you've been to church lately, you probably know how unusual it is to see a critical mass of young people in attendance. According to studies by the Barna Group, church engagement falls by as much as 43% between the ages of 18 and 29. Which is why the scene on a recent night in…
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When the newly renovated Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, N.C., was reopened in 2010, the single most dramatic work of art inside was a 15-by-31-foot mural called "The Cross," painted by Thomas Kinkade. In a video explaining the work, Kinkade speaks of the commission (by Franklin Graham) as "a moment of divine inspiration" and says…
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In his Holy Thursday homily at St. Peter's Basilica on April 5, Pope Benedict XVI denounced calls from some Catholics for optional celibacy among priests and for women's ordination. The pope said that "true renewal" comes only through the "joy of faith" and "radicalism of obedience." And renewal is coming. After the 2002 scandal about…
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