Editor’s Picks Archives

Here’s what everyone was reading at Christ and Pop Culture in 2021.

The film’s highs and lows are mined from something viscerally human and somehow understated: the desire for connection.

Jesus’s birth is a breach of human hospitality, not an example of it.

Like Paul in Dune, we can fall into the trap of moral expediency—the temptation to care more about winning than about holiness and humble service. 

Silliman argues that each of these stories prefigures the current crisis within evangelicalism.

While the Christmas story is Marvel-like in the sense that it explains Jesus’s supernatural powers by showing us his supernatural origins, it’s not fictional.

You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.

Thank God for the small comforts and consolations that pierce us to the heart with joy—the little things.

When the God you preach is nothing more than a simulacrum of your own shadow, it’s easy to justify wrongs against the least of these for your own ends.

When Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin were killed, when children die around the world of preventable disease, when children and teens experience the “death” of family and get bounced around foster homes, evil is manifest. Suffering has a face. Suddenly questioning God’s plan seems the most reasonable course of action.

All stories can and often do serve as a kind of therapeutic invitation—an opportunity to step out of our current experience and into the experiences of others, whether happy experiences we long to have, or painful experiences we’ve had and are struggling to make sense of.

Shang-Chi moved away from the modern “buffered” self toward a recognition of the enchanted “porous” self.

Even as Solar Power knocks at the hollow of everything that we seem to live for, these are questions that, even at the end, remain unanswered.

Shang-Chi’s actualization into an MCU superhero gives us a hero who comes from a culture that is more we-focused than me-focused, and I see that as a good thing.

It is enough to be made, loved, and redeemed by God. Now if only his people could figure that out.

Any competitor can only successfully lose if they have learned who they truly are outside of the sport they’re competing in.