I cover the upcoming Faith and Liberty Discovery Center, and its mission to revive appreciation for religious liberty. "Local Projects, a design studio that worked on the September 11 Memorial at Ground Zero in New York City, is designing exhibits for the center. Founder Jake Barton says the goal of many interactions will be to help visitors see “how their values connect them to other Americans present and past.” Working on the project, he says, gave him a new perspective on

I wrote this piece last year for New Year's Eve/The Feast of Mary, Mother of God. It wasn't published, so I'm putting it up this year on my site. January 1st is the solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, a feast celebrated by Catholics and some other Christians. It falls on the eighth day of the Christmas season, and commemorates Christ’s mother, Mary, under one of her most glorious titles: The Mother of God, or Theotokos. But of course, this feast coincides with New Year’s Day. T

"In 1976, a Guinean priest named Robert Sarah was made rector of John XXIII Minor Seminary in Conakry, Guinea. The previous leadership of the seminary had been lax, and so when Sarah instituted stricter rules the young men of the seminary rebelled in dramatic fashion, setting fire to its chapel. Fr. Sarah demanded the guilty parties come forward, but no one was willing to confess to the arson or reveal the perpetrators. Sarah (now Cardinal Sarah) said in his book-length biogr

I sat down to record a conversation with Doxacast, the Christian sci-fi/fantasy podcast associated with Doxacon. We discussed the history of science fiction, the eugenic dangers of utopia, and the best religious science fiction. I also give a small preview of my upcoming Doxacon talk on theology and teleology in Magic: The Gathering. Here's an excerpt from the conversation: "If we consider science fiction to be a category of worlds where there are revolutionary changes and wh

"There’s a kernel of an interesting religious film in First Reformed, the new arthouse release from writer-director Paul Schrader (Mishima, Taxi Driver, The Last Temptation of Christ). Unfortunately, it’s buried underneath the grim weight of the terrorist fantasy that Schrader really wants to explore. The film stars Ethan Hawke as a tortured Protestant reverend slowly killing himself with alcohol and self-neglect. His manly grimacing may net him an Oscar; it’s the sort of int

"Grace’s father Mr. Meacham (Robert Redford, with the kindliest of twinkles in his eye) is a teller of tall tales, but she never believed his stories about meeting a dragon in the woods. But as Pete reveals more details about Elliot, Grace gives her dad another chance to convince her. The stage is set for a variation on a well-known trope of skepticism: the “invisible dragon” argument from Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World. Sagan posits a conversation between a believer an