Not forgotten
As aging Americans increasingly grapple with dementia, churches have a growing opportunity to minister to exhausted caregivers and to comfort the forgetful
Voices
The Editors
Mailbag
A glimpse of hope Thanks to Mindy Belz for spending time in Iraq so that she could write such an informative article. It opened my eyes to the plight of Iraqi refugees ("'To stay is to be k...
Joel Belz
Trash it
If things are really bad for the economy in general for the year ahead, one component may have it even worse. Those are the folks who manage the charitable and non-profit organizations of our soci...
Janie B. Cheaney
'Keep the numbers up!'
I'm working on a short novel about a serial killer. Don't look for it-the bulk of proposed fiction never sees print. I mention it now only because of an observation made by the protagonist early i...
Mindy Belz
Timing is everything
What was that up in the sky over Baghdad? Not the usual dark Apache helicopter but a brightly colored hot-air balloon. A Christmas balloon. Fact: In a city park police closed repeatedly bec...
Fountain of youth
You do not have to wait long to hear exhortations to care for your health and your looks. Yes, most of us need more exercise than what we are getting. And, yes, we eat too much junk food. But at t...
Andrée Seu Peterson
Way out on a limb
I was given just enough George Muller to inoculate myself. I kept hearing the same recycled incident in which his orphanage has no bread or milk for the next meal, and the needed provisions turn u...
Marvin Olasky
Abortion heresy
A pro-abortion culture requires eternal vigilance. Heresy can sneak through. The New York Times has for four decades maintained abortion orthodoxy, but an editor should be fired for not cutting ou...
Culture
Music
Barry quite contrary
In late November, pop singer Barry Manilow made news for two very different reasons. One was the release of the latest installment in his best-selling series of cover songs, The Greatest Songs of ...
Books
Abortion treadmill
Some books are poorly timed through no fault of the authors. Paul Linton's Abortion Under State Constitutions (Carolina Academic Press, 2008) is a scholarly state-by-state analysis of how unborn c...
Books
Healthy competition
We decide which goods and services to purchase from an amazing array offered to us in many areas of our lives. But, for most Americans, two of the most critical areas are exceptions to our nationa...
Notable CDs
Notable CDs
Style: The pinnacle of this San Francisco band's long-celebrated (and recently reissued) blues-rock oeuvre. Worldview: "[T]here was more of what the folkies were after in [John Fogerty's] t...
Notable Books
Notable books
This latest entry in the long-running Dalziel and Pascoe series combines the police procedural genre with an update of Jane Austen's Sanditon. In this version Sanditon becomes Sandytown, a planned...
Movies & TV
On the run
Very little stings the ears like Rudolf Hess' horrifying 1934 Nuremberg rally speech, but that's the sound that Edward Zwick has chosen to open his new movie. "Hitler is Germany!" Hess screams in ...
Movies & TV
Road rage
This is the second time that British American Beauty director Sam Mendes has presumed to tell suburban Americans about themselves, and in that respect the soulless Revolutionary Road is an improve...
Movies & TV
Millionaire class
Rudyard Kipling captured Bombay ("Mother of Cities to me") with its purple fruits, shadowy palm-groves, and "gaily dressed Parsees wading out to worship the sunset." Kipling would have been fascin...
Movies & TV
Tough love
Doubt, an excellent big-screen adaptation of a Broadway play by John Patrick Shanley, starts with three familiar figures: a kind Catholic priest, a harsh intolerant nun, and a trusting young nun. ...
Movies & TV
Culture clash
Leave it to Clint Eastwood to make a drama that generates more belly-busting laughs than most recent comedies and more insight into what drives and satisfies the human spirit than the majority of ...
Dispatches
Quick Takes
Quick Takes
Fowl play Authorities in Berlin encountered a scene that could have passed as a part of an Alfred Hitchcock horror flick: a two-room apartment stuffed with approximately 1,500 live parakeet...
Quotables
Quotables
"Two plus two always equals four, never five." Cuban President Raul Castro on his plans to cut spending and eliminate some government programs. "The accounts don't square up," he said. "You...
The Buzz
The Buzz
War without end Israel and Gaza's year ended miserably: After Hamas forces repeatedly fired rockets into Israel at the end of a six-month ceasefire between the two sides, Israel retaliated ...