After idealizing super rich geniuses in film, Superman brought the evil billionaire back and that's exactly what we want to see.
The opinion of the ultra-wealthy has undergone a sharp decline in the past few years as economic conditions have worsened for much of the population. Meanwhile, the fortunes of those at the top have continued to grow. Rather than visionaries who can save the world when governments can’t, they are more likely to be seen now as obstacles to progress and impediments to the actions that need to be taken to save the world.
That said, across dozens of data points, the broader trend is clear: a sizable cohort of consumers has been trained to wait for streaming. The result is a new rhythm of movie consumption: theatrical releases generate a strong, sustained wave of attention; paid digital releases produce a sharp but fleeting spike in activity; and subscription services deliver a smaller second uptick.
Streaming services and Plex are both great ways to spend a lot of time scrolling through options without actually watching anything. A new app takes all your Plex content and…
I’m positive Apple TV owners are more engaged with their devices and probably have extremely favorable demographics compared to the users of a $20 streaming stick.
Apple TV is “essentially dead”? No, long live Apple TV.
Jonathan Edwards offers plenty of fire and brimstone, yes,  but he’s not calling for revival. The sermon doesn’t end with an altar call. His argument is that there would be no point in having an altar call because we’re all miserable, helpless sinners, wholly dependent on God’s grace, and we have no agency in the matter of our own salvation, repentance, or revival.
Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God Is A Lousy Sermon
A short history of a word that stopped doing its job
Here’s what the Catholic/Protestant argument leaves out entirely, and it’s not a minor omission to make. There’s a third major branch of the historic church that predates the entire Western argument and never joined either side of it. Eastern Orthodoxy split from Rome in 1054, a full five centuries before Luther, and has spent the intervening thousand years developing an understanding of salvation that looks almost nothing like the transactional model both Catholics and Protestants have spent their energy arguing over.
Kallistos Ware’s writing is probably the clearest English-language entry point into this understanding, and the central concept is theosis. Rather than salvation as a legal verdict, guilty or acquitted, the Eastern tradition frames it as participation, the process of a human being progressively taking on the divine nature, becoming by grace what God is by nature. The instinct runs deeper than the New Testament. The Wisdom of Solomon, writing a century or so before Christ, already insists that “God created us for incorruption” (Wisdom 2:23, NRSVue).7 Second Peter picks up the same thread, promising believers that they “may become participants of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4, NRSVue).5 Most scholarship treats the letter as pseudepigraphical, written in Peter’s name a generation or two after his death, which places the phrase in the wider stream of early Christian reflection rather than in an eyewitness’s own hand. The theological claim carries the same weight either way. The West mostly read past both texts on its way to arguing about justification. The East built an entire soteriology around them. Ware puts the whole doctrine in a single line, that Christ “became what we are, so as to make us what he is.”6
I’ve written before about Macrina the Younger and her brother Gregory of Nyssa, two of the sharpest minds the fourth century produced, and theosis is the very water they swam in. Gregory imagined the Christian life as an endless ascent, a soul continually moving deeper into a God whose depths never run out, a strange and beautiful image to build a theology around, and one almost nobody in the American religious argument has heard of.
Two entire traditions, evangelical Protestantism and its confessional Catholic counterpart, have spent decades arguing about who holds the correct account of the gospel, largely as if the Christian East doesn’t exist. It’s a third of the historic church, holding an account of salvation that overturns the entire transaction both sides have been fighting over. If the aim was ever to define what “Christian” means in full, the argument was incomplete before it even started.
Ask most Americans what “Christian” means and you’ll get an answer that has almost nothing to do with the Nicene Creed and almost everything to do with a set of cultural benchmarks. Voted a certain way. Watches a certain kind of news. Sends kids to a certain kind of school. Sings a certain kind of music on Sunday, if any Sunday singing happens at all. Somewhere in the last fifty years or so, “Christian” stopped functioning as a theological category and started functioning more as a demographic one, and the demographic in question is white evangelical Protestantism specifically, not Christianity in the aggregate.
When ICE officials handcuffed the lifeless body of Joan Sebastian Guerrero—a young man and father, here legally—in a parking lot in Biddeford, Maine, we saw the America that Lindsey Graham warned us about in action. It’s an America he helped create.
A case study in the rise of authoritarianism. Sen. Lindsey Graham is a central player in the Republican party’s capitulation to Donald Trump. We can watch the GOP's turn to authoritarianism by reviewing Graham's many public statements.
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