Imagine yourself a cloned child created from the DNA of a wealthy person who wants to have your organs available for transplant, when he later needs them. The only life you know as a child is as one of a large number of other clones who are kept in the setting of an isolated English [...]

I have an actor friend, Joe Abbey-Colborne, who worked with me in campus evangelism nearly twenty years ago. When I first suggested a collaboration to him, he was nervous. He had had too many experiences of doing dramatic sketches, then having a preacher stand up and say, “Now, I hope you understand that this character [...]

One of my favorite songs of recent memory is Tom Waits’ Chocolate Jesus because it so well captures and subverts our Western culture’s obsession with do-it-yourself “spirituality” (a nefarious term which, by the way, now only functions as a short form for “anything goes”).  With his distinctive voice, once described as sounding “like it was [...]

Slumdog Millionaire is a 2008 British film directed by Danny Boyle, written by Simon Beaufoy, and co-directed in India by Loveleen Tandan.  It is an adaptation of the Boeke Prize-winning and Commonwealth Writers’ Prize-nominated novel Q & A (2005) by Indian author and diplomat Vikas Swarup.
If you are not familiar with the film the synopsis [...]

Last year’s Oscars were all about the dark and the tragic with No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood going home with some of the top nods (two of my favorite movies last year, by the way).  This year’s Oscars were more light-hearted—there wasn’t much of the tragic with Brad Pitt as [...]

Church Planter and Filmmaker Joe Manafo’s 43-minute documentary on new and evolving forms of church in Canada, One Size Fits All? has just been released on DVD and is available for sale at http://www.onesizefitsall.ca/.  Manafo visits fresh expressions of church across Canada, including Emerge and St. Benedict’s Table, Anglican fresh expressions of church in Montreal [...]

I came across an article in TimesOnline about a month ago now. It was a top twenty list of the most religiously offensive cultural moments of the last thirty or so years. The article, “The Blasphemy Collection” listed one of my personal favorites. Monty Python’s Life of Brian was there with its infamous protagonist, Brian Cohen, [...]

Earlier this past summer, my wife and I watched Lars and the Real Girl starring Ryan Gosling. If you’re a fan of the HBO series Six Feet Under, you’ll really enjoy this one. The screenplay was written by Nancy Oliver who wrote some of the best Six Feet Under episodes. Not only is this movie [...]