Whether you’re an adult or a teenager who likes to read young adult novels, you might want to check out book reviews at Chuck Colson’s BreakPoint. Editor Gina Dalfonzo created the Youth Reads section to give Christians some guidance on the latest (and popular) young adult novels.
I’ve written a few reviews for the site, and I have an upcoming short feature on sex-selective abortions.
For more information on the topic, see Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men. The author is “pro-choice,” but the book is objective enough, informative, and well researched.
I hear the zombie show on AMC, “The Walking Dead,” is getting hot. The second season premiere broke records. Good for them. Zombies are underrated, don’t you think?
In 2008, I interviewed the actor Jon Bernthal, who plays Shane Walsh. I’d reviewed an independent film called Day Zero for Blog Critics and wanted to talk to one of the actors. From the available actors I chose Bernthal.
Day Zero is set in the near future, and America is going to war. Three friends receive draft notices and have 30 days to report for duty. Bernthal played a cab driver, and his character’s love interest was played by Elisabeth Moss, who portrays Peggy Olson on AMC’s “Mad Men.” Small world.
Since I’m getting a number of hits for “jon bernthal,” I thought I’d reprint the telephone interview originally published at Blog Critics in 2008:
Raised in Washington, D.C., country music-loving actor Jon Bernthal went to Russia to study acting and ended up playing professional baseball. He’s no longer playing ball, but his acting career is on the upswing. In the independent film Day Zero (read the review), Bernthal plays a street-wise cab driver named James Dixon who, along with two friends (played by Elijah Wood and Chris Klein), receives a draft notice and has 30 days to report for duty. The story follows the trio as they struggle with political and personal convictions, fear, and leaving behind loved ones.
I asked Bernthal about his character, his patriotism, and his upcoming projects.
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What makes a movie “Christian?”
Does a story with no explicit reference(s) to Christ qualify? What if it contained a redemptive and/or sacrificial message, or focused on atonement?
Perhaps the question isn’t whether a piece of art is “Christian” or even Christian-themed, but whether we can “take joy in God’s material creation, in the colors and sounds and textures and tastes of all the good things he has created,” as Brett McCracken writes in the recently published Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide (which I reviewed for the Christian Research Journal.)
God’s handiwork is part of general revelation, God revealed in nature (as opposed to special revelation, God revealed through his word and through Christ), and there’s beauty and truth in secular pursuits. Christians can and should discuss with unbelievers spiritual and transcendent messages that may be found in secular films.
While I’d like to see more Christian entertainment in Hollywood, as Christians should be salt and light in the world, even in Hollywood, the message doesn’t have to be explicit. The Chronicles of Narnia and Mere Christianity author C.S. Lewis talked about smuggling the Gospel past “watchful dragons” in his fiction. That’s what I’m attempting to do as I work on novel revisions (which is why draft #3 is essentially a rewrite). I’d intended to be explicit, but decided to be subtle, as I have embarrassingly high hopes of seeing the book published by a mainstream house and read by secular readers.
Movies like The Matrix and Atonement don’t qualify as Christian movies, but they contain a shadow of the Gospel, one might argue. In the third movie of The Matrix series, a man’s sacrifice saves a city of survivors from physical death, as opposed to the Son of God’s sacrifice saving the forgiven from spiritual death. In Atonement, an old woman tries to make amends for telling a lie that kept her sister and the man she loved apart by creating a happy ending in fictional form. For the Christian, Christ has done the substitutionary, atoning work for us, once and forever, on the cross.
