The false sense of solidarity that comes with sharing an Oliver segment on Facebook is an invitation to apathy not resistance.
TV
Posted inArts & Culture, Ideas
John Oliver: Comic Crusader Against the Status Quo
“Last Week Tonight” is the best example of the power that humor can have in bringing about change.
Posted inArts & Culture
Lemony Snicket’s tales for children take children seriously
As in real life, in Netflix’s adaptation unfortunate events take their course, punctuated by victories great and small, ad infinitum.
Posted inArts & Culture, Television
Is it easier to see your own sin in outer space?
Why is it easier to explore the gritty reality of racism, sexism or elitism when it’s set in another world?
Posted inArts & Culture, Television
It’s time to admit it: Benedict Cumberbatch isn’t a good Sherlock Holmes
Is Sherlock Holmes back? Well, it depends on how we define “back.”
Posted inArts & Culture, Culture
Can “Planet Earth II” help us love the ugly animals too?
The second installment of the BBC series treats animals like movie stars.
Posted inArts & Culture, Television
The Young Pope: The Catholic art that Catholics need (but might not want).
Jude Law gives us a nuanced portrait of a too easily satirized character: the Catholic cleric.
Posted inArts & Culture, Television
Sherlock Holmes: Pop Culture’s Christ Figure
What is it about Sherlock; drama that elicits such admiration and, at times, troubling obsessiveness?
Posted inDispatches, Faith
Learning from Carrie Fisher and the rest of the secular saints we lost in 2016
These people’s lives gave us a glimpse of something meaningful, something that liberated or encouraged us.
Posted inArts & Culture, In All Things
The Jew, Catholic and Midwestern Christian behind ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’
The holiday special was the product of a Jewish producer from San Francisco and a Mexican-American Catholic whose mother brought him across the border in the 1920s.