While re-watching Frost/Nixon, I was struck by one of the opening lines of the film.  Reflecting on the whole experience of interviewing Richard Nixon, James Reston, Jr. (Sam Rockwell) says of David Frost (Michael Sheen), “He understood television better than any of us.”  I’ve been thinking more and more about the church in the digital [...]

Whenever pop culture icons exhibit bad behavior…behavior that would ruin the careers and lives of us average folk…the social commentators inevitably talk about how America is a forgiving culture.  As time passes, society will forgive and forget, or at least the most recent scandal will occupy our attention.  When the news story broke about Michael [...]

Religion Dispatches has an interesting article up this morning entitled “When the Gods Die:  Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett Take the 70s With Them” by Anthea Butler.  Butler is Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Rochester and teaches in the areas of African American religious history, [...]

Unless you’re working the night shift and have just woken up for work, you probably already know that Michael Jackson, the self-proclaimed King of Pop, died earlier this afternoon of a heart attack.  Since his passing, the cable news networks have been debating his place in music history:  who is greater Elvis, The Beatles, or [...]

Yesterday, I had the privilege of meeting a local artist, Pamela Blotner, works in sculpture, drawing, and illustrations.  Hopefully, she’ll be offering some courses on religion/spirituality and the arts at the Graduate Theological Union through the Center for Arts and Religious Education in the near future.  She occasionally teaches at Pixar as well.  Check out [...]

Here are the final selections from my interview with Barry Taylor.  In these videos, he discusses the fading sacred/secular divide in popular culture as well as atheistic sacrality and contemporary art.  Good stuff.

A new interreligious website recently launched called Patheos.  It’s a much needed concept that offers different religious perspectives on pressing issues.  It has a host of lenses through which to compare different religious responses to both new and age old questions.  For this week’s edition on the meaning of existence, I was asked to write [...]