The Vulnerability of Pain When Church Looks Like Dr. Death
Dr. Death and The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill are both entertainment, but we’d be amiss to overlook the clear warning signs they provide.
“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.
Why Are Dr. Rick’s Progressive Ads Actually Traditional Comedy?
Dr. Rick ads provide a relaxed common ground between generations and opportunities for approachable honesty with those outside the church.
Natalie Bergman’s Mercy Is an Exquisite Expression of Grief, Faith, and Love
These songs may be deeply sad, but the album serves as a stirring reminder that death doesn’t have the final word.
Volodymyr Zelensky at the Bridge: The Costly Virtue of Heroism in the Real World
We don’t have any stories of heroes without heroes in real life.
Station Eleven: The Virtue of Helping Even When You Don’t Know What You’re Doing
Healing doesn’t require a degree. But it does require a willingness to share someone’s suffering.
CAPC’s Most-Read Articles of 2021
Here’s what everyone was reading at Christ and Pop Culture in 2021.
Spider-Man: No Way Home: The Worth and The Cost of Being Seen
The film’s highs and lows are mined from something viscerally human and somehow understated: the desire for connection.
Don’t Throw Away Your Nativity Sets: Why Jesus May Not Have Been Born in a “Lower Room”
Jesus’s birth is a breach of human hospitality, not an example of it.
Dune and Disaster, or, Why Charismatic Leaders Should Come with a Warning Label
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.
Fictional Evangelicalism: On Reading Daniel Silliman’s Reading Evangelicals
Silliman argues that each of these stories prefigures the current crisis within evangelicalism.
Is Christmas Marvel-ous?
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.
No, You Can’t Get It All Done: Time Management for Mortals and Mineo’s Never Land II
You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.
Loving the God of Little Things
Thank God for the small comforts and consolations that pierce us to the heart with joy—the little things.
Breaking Bread: Midnight Mass and the Inversion of the Eucharist
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.
Lyrics of Lament: Suffering and Theodicy in Hip-Hop
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.
