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 September 1, 2007 - October 1, 2007
Men and Church
Posted Sunday, September 30, 2007 in Orthodoxy, Christian Life, Gender
[Beliefnet; September 30, 2007]
In a time when churches of every description are faced with Vanishing Male Syndrome, men are showing up at Eastern Orthodox churches in numbers that, if not numerically impressive, are proportionately intriguing. This may be the only church which attracts and holds men in numbers equal to women. As Leon Podles wrote in his 1999 book, The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity, “The Orthodox are the only Christians who write basso profundo church music, or need to.”
Rather than guess why this is, I emailed a hundred Orthodox men, most of whom joined the Church as adults.
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Into the Wild
Posted Thursday, September 27, 2007 in Movie Reviews
[Christianity Today Movies, Sept 28, 2007]
I keep thinking I saw this movie before, except that then it starred Shirley Temple. A lovely young person appears and touches the lives of people from all walks of life, bringing them a little bit of sunshine, and guilelessly showing the way to a better life. But in the other movie there wasn’t a close-up of maggots crawling through a moose carcass. Not that I remember, anyway.
“Into the Wild” is a pretty infuriating movie, because it insists on treating the central character as an escapee from “Godspell.”
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