I was 15 years old when “Born in the U.S.A.” was released, and even those of us in Canada couldn’t evade its impact and allure. This was also the era of the emerging ubiquity of the music video, so Courtney Cox’s cameo in the “Dancing in the Dark” video is forever emblazoned on my memory….
The inestimable Byron Borger pointed to a recent feature in The Guardian: “The 10 best…closing lines of books.” All of them are a treat, but the closing line from Eliot’s Middlemarch (a book, incidentally, that I think is instructive for contemporary discussions about science and religion) deserves to be highlighted (and is too long to be…
As someone who has written extensively about the formative power of “secular liturgies,” you might think I’d be primed to analyze the opening ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics as an example of just such a “secular” liturgy. In other words, you might think I’d be sympathetic to George Weigel’s critical analysis of the opening…
I’ve expanded my first ruminations on the NCAA’s sanctions against Penn State’s football program in an op-ed for the Detroit Free Press, now available online.
I was struck by the goal of the NCAA sanctions, which was described several times (in the recent press conference) as “cultural change” within the football program at Penn State. I think that goal is exactly right (if it’s sincere) and necessary. But this raises the question: how do you change the “culture” of an institution?…
Over at “The Church and Postmodern Culture,” our fearless coordinator, Chad Lakies, has organized an extended online engagement with my latest book, the second edition of The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic (Baker Academic, 2012). Over the next few weeks, there will be contributions from Mark Bowald (Redeemer University College), Neal DeRoo…