What IT: Chapter Two Teaches Us About Defeating the Devil SPOILER WARNING: This article contains spoilers from IT: Chapter Two. Read at your own risk. IT: Chapter Two finds seven childhood friends reuniting after 27 years to face off against an enemy that has returned to terrorize their hometown. The film, while offering up plenty…
This article was published in Church Leaders on July 10, 2019. Last month, actress and singer Selena Gomez confessed that she is “scared” by what she sees as the exposure of young girls and boys on Instagram and other social media platforms. Speaking at the Cannes Film Festival, she said, “for my generation, specifically, social…
Last month, I wrote about the care and keeping of the soul in Fathom Magazine. The gist of that article is that our souls feed on mystery. This is in contrast to our bodies and minds which feed on substances that are far easier to define and access. In fact, we often tend to our bodies and minds to the neglect of our souls, and I thought I’d share some more thoughts about that below.
Shortly after word spread today that Paris’ iconic Notre Dame Cathedral was being ravaged by fire, the hashtag #PrayforNotreDame began trending on social media.
At first, that struck me as odd.
Continue readingWhy Pray for Notre Dame? Why Pray for a Building at All?
This article was published at Speculative Faith on January 25, 2019. What Gotham needs is not a dark knight, but a hero who operates by a different code. Fox’s Batman origin series, Gotham, has returned for its fifth and final season. The show features a bevy of proto-villains from the future Dark Knight’s Rogues Gallery—Poison…
This article was published in Fathom Magazine’s 23rd issue, “Death,” on November 19, 2018.
There are some things that we should neither like nor accept. Death is such a thing. Yet, it feels like our society is becoming complacent toward death. And not just complacent—accepting, embracing even.
I didn’t know Stan Lee. You probably didn’t either.
Yet, within the past week, you’ve likely been touched by one of his creations.
A version of this article was published in Speculative Faith on December 7, 2018, under the title, “Growing Diversity in Fantasy Genres Gives Us Hints of Eternity.”
By definition, science fiction and fantasy are unique among literary genres because of the presence of a wide range of diverse characters and people groups. Certainly, many are fictional (as far as we know)—Vulcans, Calormenes, sentient droids. Certainly, many portrayals, such as that of female characters and Native Americans, have been fetishized and over-troped. But, like much of the world, science fiction and fantasy are growing up, growing wiser, and embracing the stories of traditionally marginalized people groups. Some might say SFF is ahead of the curve.
Recently, I finished reading the incredible Zeroes series by Scott Westerfeld, Margo Lanagan, and Deborah Biancotti. This story about a bunch of teenagers who discover they have crowd-based superpowers is probably the first series I’ve ever read where I felt completely satisfied at the end. It didn’t end on a cliffhanger, demanding endless what-abouts. Nor did it end with me wishing there was another book in the series. It’s okay that there isn’t.
Seeing the whole image of God in virtuous traits exhibited by men and women. This piece was published in Fathom Magazine on July 11, 2018. I read C. S. Lewis’s science fiction novels, called The Space Trilogy, a couple of years before the current firestorm of awareness on gender issues. With the amount of attention paid…