Russian Doll: Why Do We Get Stuck Obsessing Over the Rightness of Every Choice?

Sometimes there is no way to tell which course of action is right, certainly not before the fact and likely not afterwards either.

“This Is How I Fight”: Learning Kindness in Everything Everywhere All at Once

We find hope and meaning not in doing right or being right but in the kindness shown to us by God in Christ, and enacted in our relationships with other people.

When You Think God Is on Your Side: The Fall of the Russian Empire

Nicholas’s assumption that he was acting on God’s behalf to preserve the divinely-blessed Russian Empire pushed the country into disaster. 

The Aviator: How Memory, Love, and Art Transform the World

In The Aviator, Vodolazkin redirects our attention away from history as a sequence of ideological movements and towards the individual actions of human beings, each imbued with eternity.

Squid Game and the Good Samaritan: Solidarity and Compassion in a Competitive World

Squid Game shows us the value of sacrificial, compassionate action to our own life of faith, especially within a competitive, late capitalist society.

Book(s) of Strange New Things: How Missionary-in-Space Novels Invite Us to Reckon with Catastrophe and Faith

The Book of Strange New Things invites us to reckon with the reality of our shifting, ever-uncertain faith.

Looking for Mercy in Netflix’s Lucifer

As believers, while we acknowledge the reality and transcendence of divine law, we also recognize its shortcomings—it cannot make us righteous—and its supersession by mercy.

A Call to Bear Witness: Watching Russian Doll in the Time of COVID

Russian Doll speaks to the isolation and surreality of our pandemic moment.

Mona Haydar Challenges Authoritarianism

As Mona Haydar makes clear, faith which worships human authority and depends on rules for other people is a form of godliness only, not the real thing.

Deliver Us: What the Prince of Egypt Has to Say about Suffering

If Exodus voices our collective hunger for deliverance, it also calls us to work for deliverance, toward liberatory action.

Trope Alert: The Real Virus Is Sin

The video makes it harder, not easier, for watching Christians to envision how their faith calls them to engage with the surrounding world in a time of crisis.

Whispers of Hope: Apocalyptic Comfort in Mad Max: Fury Road

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, Fury Road offers a glimpse of coming renewal, of rebirth.

Fleabag Offers Hope for Those of Us Who Seem to Get Everything Wrong

Through love, we weather the worst of our decisions and become more human. 

When Cops Make Mistakes: Thinking through Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give

Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give reminds us to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God.

I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore Tackles the Existential Crisis

Mingled terror and hope will be with us so long as we live, as we can see in the indie black comedy I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore.

Telling Stories of Strange Worlds: Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin describes what should be familiar to Christians but is too often strange: the significance and worth of the individual human soul.