Monthly Archives: March 2014

Harlen Coben’s Missing You: Wrestling With The Past (Book Review)

Two authors have dominated the “thriller” genre so significantly for me that I must buy their latest books. I’d even buy them if they suddenly dropped everything and became pulp romance authors! (Okay, maybe that’s a stretch.) But Lee Child … Continue reading

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Frozen 2.0: Breaking Out Of The Box (Movie Review)

In December, I wrote that Frozen was one of the best movies I’d seen in 2013. I focused on the “act of true love” and what self-sacrificial love looked like. It was so easy to bubble over with enthusiasm about the “final … Continue reading

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Noah > Son Of God. Stop The Madness! (Mustard Seed Musing)

Hollywood wants to cash in on the Christian market that was the big score a decade ago with Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. This year, Mark Burnett and Roma Downey released Son of God, complete with the backing of evangelicals … Continue reading

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Catching Fire: What Does A Revolution Cost? (Movie Review)

In the second installment of the Hunger Games series (is that a trilogy or a quadrilogy?), Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) finds herself in a different predicament than in the first film when she entered the Games in place of her younger sister. Now, … Continue reading

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Resurrection: Do You Want To Believe? (TV Review)

Midseason TV replacements are tricky. They often have a significant pilot but then often appear like a “flash in the pan,” disappearing before Johnny Q. Public has had a chance to even consider watching them. But Resurrection, ABC’s eight-episode series based … Continue reading

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True Detective Ep. 8: Brothers In Arms (TV Review)

Matthew McConaughey should win another Oscar. It’s too bad he’ll have to settle for an Emmy, as long as folks don’t forget about True Detective by then. In the vein of other gritty cable shows like The Wire, Banshee, The Bridge, and The Killing, True Detective takes … Continue reading

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Sunday’s Sermon Today: What Kind Of Friend Are You? 2.0 (Luke 5:17-26)

Last month, I preached on this particular passage to a group of District clergy gathered together for our monthly meeting. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that there was more there than I had gotten to … Continue reading

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Sunday’s Sermon Today: “Friend” Me (John 5:1-15)

Have you ever been physically incapacitated? Unable to move on your own? It’s often a condition of life that assign to the very young and the very old, but I had a brush with it a decade ago. I broke … Continue reading

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Mr. Peabody & Sherman: Our Adoptive Relationship (Movie Review)

Mr. Peabody & Sherman is Twentieth Century Fox/Dreamwork’s latest animated adventure, written by Craig Wright (a seminary grad, and writer for Dirty Sexy Money, Lost, and Six Feet Under), about a talking dog and his human son, Sherman (Max Charles). This particular dog, Mr. … Continue reading

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Get Church Right: Are We “Post-Church”? (A Mustard Seed Musing)

Several of the conversations happening around the United Methodist Church seem to imply that the denomination itself won’t last into the second half of the twenty-first century. While non-denominational churches shoot up and mushroom out in pockets of suburbia, the … Continue reading

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