essays
I write on many different topics: Eastern Orthodox Christianity, movie reviews, Christian life, the culture, and more. If you’d like to sort my essays by category, click here .
Entries from January 1, 2005 - February 1, 2005
In Good Company
Posted Wednesday, January 26, 2005 in Movie Reviews
[National Review Online, January 28, 2005]
"In Good Company" opened the same week that Academy Award nominations were announced. Top honors went to movies about big-shouldered men: a crazy-brilliant inventor and filmmaker, a man who saved a thousand people from machete-wielding Hutus, the quiet genius who invented Peter Pan. Now comes Dennis Quaid as Dan Foreman, a suburban fifty-something who sells ad space in a sports magazine. Can this man be a hero?
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Democrats and Pro-lifers
Posted Saturday, January 22, 2005 in Pro-Life
- Updated on Wednesday, January 19, 2005 -
[NPR, "Morning Edition," January 22, 2005]
The other night a couple of dozen young professionals and college students, mostly Eastern Orthodox Christians, crowded into my house for dinner. We played a current events party game. We divided the group in two and assigned one side to favor, and the other to oppose, five controversial issues.
At the end of the discussion we went around the room and voted. One after another, these twenty- and thirty-somethings said that one issue was more important to them than any other. They were strongly opposed to abortion.
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Dutch Child Euthanasia
Posted Saturday, January 8, 2005 in Pro-Life
[Christianity Today Online, December 28, 2004]
If you close your eyes and picture a housewife with a bucket of hot water and a bristle brush, scrubbing away at her front doorstep, the small line of type at the lower corner of your imagination reads "The Netherlands." That's the Dutch: tidy, polite, reasonable and compassionate.
"Tidy" and "compassionate" can intersect in a strange way, however, when it comes to handling the tragedies of life. Three years ago, the Dutch Parliament shocked the world by passing a law allowing "mercy killing" under certain circumstances.
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All We Can Do Is Watch
Posted Thursday, January 6, 2005 in Christian Life, The Culture
[Beliefnet, January 7, 2005]
On December 26 the tsunami hit, and on the 27th I set out on a long car trip, circling through the south and visiting family. So while most of you were being continually hammered by new and terrible information, I was getting it in small, amazing pieces - a headline on a motel newspaper, a TV broadcast in a diner. The numbers mounted in a way that seemed unreal, artificial. At first it was twenty thousand feared dead, then seventy, and all of a sudden someone told me the toll was nearing 140,000.
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Widowhood and Remarriage, Unbaptized Babies
Posted Thursday, January 6, 2005 in Christian Life
[Today's Christian, January-February 2005]
Q. I was widowed a few years ago and totally devastated by my loss. I am so tired of feeling lost and lonely. Lately I've been wishing I had someone to talk to in the evenings. Though I have no desire to remarry, I would like at le ast to have some companionship with the opposite sex. But these thoughts make me feel so guilty and disloyal to my late husband, though I know he has gone to a beautiful, wondrous place where matters of the heart no longer hold any meaning.
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