I first encountered The Lord of the Rings during the loneliest year of my childhood. My family had moved, my friends had been left behind, and I was lonely. The one friend I did make that year was an avid fan of the books and pleaded with me to read them. I did so and…
We live at a time of great public immorality, a time in which the only thing that is shameful is shame itself. Immorality is synonymous with entertainment and the basest sexual perversions are flaunted on-screen for all to see. Television shows compete among themselves to explore and transgress any boundary. The very things that marked…
At a recent Ask Me Anything event in India, I was asked if I felt Christians often disconnected their entertainment choices from their faith, especially in the area of watching Hollywood and Bollywood films. Here is my response. Transcript Do you think that Christians often disconnect their entertainment choices from their faith? It’s actually a…
The more time you spend reading history, the more you see how things that are considered normal by one generation are often considered scandalous by the next. The moral laxity of one age often gives way to the moral clarity of the one that follows. I’m convinced an area of moral laxity among today’s Christians…
Scandal after scandal has broken over Hollywood and, for perhaps the first time, we are all seeing what goes on behind the lens. And now I think it’s time we, as Christians, had a talk about Tinseltown. You can watch this video in YouTube or Facebook formats or scroll down for the transcript. Rush Transcript…
Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, is like any other business leader in that he is constantly challenged with the question of competition: Who is the competition, and what do you plan to do about them? He was asked this question a week ago during the regularly-scheduled Q1 earnings call, and his answer is both fascinating…
Regular readers of this site will know that for some time I’ve been writing articles under the banner of “Sex on the Silver Screen.” These articles grapple with the morality of scenes of nudity and sexuality in film and television. While there has been a long association between sex and the silver screen, only in…
We must be the most entertained generation in all of human history. We take entertainment as our inalienable right. If we work hard during the day, we assume we have earned a few hours of amusement at night. Actually, we can’t even make it through the day without at least a few distractions—a couple of…
The past few weeks have brought quite a number of interesting letters to the editor. These are letters written by readers in response to something I’ve written. I hope you enjoy them! Letters on Sex on the Silver Screen The first few letters deal with the few articles I’ve written on the subject of sex…
I once read a memoir by a man who, as a teen, had been a Shabbos goy. A Shabbos goy is a non-Jew who performs some of the Sabbath-day functions that that are forbidden to the devout. Traditionally, a Shabbos goy would extinguish candles and lights, or he would stoke up a fire on a…
It has been nearly a year since I laid the comments section to rest and begin inviting letters to the editor in its stead. It has been a blessing to receive so many hundreds of letters over the past year and to be able to share the best of them. Here are a few from…
It has been nearly a year since I laid the comments section to rest and begin inviting letters to the editor in its stead. It has been a blessing to receive so many hundreds of letters over the past year and to be able to share the best of them. Here are a few from…
If you’re a gamer, or a Christian gamer at least, you’ve rolled your eyes through a hundred articles by now, each one telling you why your gaming is sad, wasteful, pathetic. You’re immature, you’re addicted to pleasure, you’re a dopamine junkie. You might even have found yourself compared to a porn addict since in many…
This was a banner week when it came to letters to the editor. I had a lot of letters to choose from on a lot of different subjects—something I found rather a joy. Here are some of the best of them. Comments on War, Women, and Wealth Thank you for your article on War, Women,…
No Man’s Sky was supposed to change gaming forever. It was pitched as offering players a vast world with nearly endless opportunities to explore and nearly infinite varieties of planets and life to discover. It promised an incredible 18 quintillion (that’s 18 billion billion) planets to find—far more than a million gamers on a million…
Stranger Things is a smash hit, the talk of Twitter and the toast of the town. Its story is captivating, its characters well-formed, its acting first rate, its tributes to the 80’s priceless. With so much buzz and so many friends celebrating it, I figured I’d give it a go. But this isn’t an article…
How much television do you think you watch? No, honestly, how much? And how much time do you give to other screens—your mobile phone, your tablet, and whatever it is you use to watch Netflix? A brand new study from Nielsen suggests that it is a lot. A heap. A ton. Way more than you…
As Christians, we look with ultimate hope to our ultimate future—the sure hope that we will be with God forever in a world free of sin and all its ugly effects. Christ will return, and what He has prepared for us will be more glorious than all we can ask or even imagine. It’s the…
Yesterday I looked briefly at entertainment addiction and attempted to propose a definition of entertainment. I said that entertainment is an escape or distraction from normal life. Perhaps I should have added that it is an “enjoyable” escape or distraction. While this is an imperfect definition, I think it is useful, at the least. We…
A few days ago John Piper answered a question about addiction to entertainment. He expressed his concern with our need today to be entertained and to be entertained near-constantly. He then offered a few pointers on escape this addiction. This little article got me thinking and I wanted to offer just a couple of thoughts…