Free Republic

At the time of the Roe v. Wade decision, I was a college student — an anti-war, mother-earth, feminist, hippie college student. That particular January I was taking a semester off, living in the D.C. area and volunteering at the feminist “underground newspaper” Off Our Backs. As you’d guess, I was strongly in favor of legalizing abortion. The bumper sticker on my car read, “Don’t labor under a misconception; legalize abortion.” The first issue of Off Our Backs after the Roe decision included one of my movie reviews, and also an essay by another member of the collective criticizing the...

Frederica in Orthodoxy, Christian Life, Christian Apologetics [Beliefnet: March 23, 2006] Hell has never been a fashionable destination, but it in recent years it’s met a fate that even the most passé hotspots don’t endure; people suspect it doesn’t exist. Or, if it does exist, it attracts no customers; "we are permitted to hope that hell is empty" is how this is sometimes phrased. Even the most conservative Christians have a hard time putting a positive spin on a wrathful God who flings evildoers into flaming torment. It is tragic that some Christians have been so battered with stories of...

I’m a fan of old movies, the black-and-whites from the 1930s and 1940s, in part because of what they reveal about how American culture has changed. The adults in these films carry themselves differently. They don’t walk and speak the way we do. It’s often hard to figure out how old the characters are supposed to be—as though they were portraying a phase of the human life-cycle that we don’t have any more. Take the 1934 film Imitation of Life. Here Claudette Colbert portrays a young widow who builds a successful business. (Selling pancakes, actually. Well, it’s more believable if...

The transition to adulthood used to be one of the main goals of the young. Adulthood was seen to be a status worth achieving and was understood to be a set of responsibilities worth fulfilling. At least, that's the way it used to be. Now, an entire generation seems to be finding itself locked in the grip of eternal youth, unwilling or unable to grow up. Concern about this phenomenon has been building for some time. Baby-boomer parents are perplexed when their adult-age children move back home, fail to find a job, and appear to be in no hurry to...

Summer days in the Holy Land are hot and still; the relentless sun beats down on green-gray shrubs and dusty rubble. It was on one such day--on August 6, as the church remembers--that Jesus took his closest disciples, Peter, James, and John, and led them up the side of "a high mountain." It is Mt. Tabor that claims this honor. Perhaps the three were used to being taken aside for private conferences. But they weren’t prepared for what happened next. When they reached the peak, St. Matthew tells us that Jesus “was transfigured before them, and his face shone like...

He's the Bulldog of Bergen, the Pride of New Jersey, the Hope of the Irish: James J. Braddock, has-been, might-have-been, and struggling breadwinner. As Russell Crowe portrays this real-life figure from the Depression era in Cinderella Man, he lopes down the sidewalk with his eyebrows tented in mild surprise and his mouth hanging slightly ajar. This Cinderella still has dust behind his ears. Braddock is no ball of fire. He's not motivated by a passion for boxing, like Maggie in last fall's hit, Million Dollar Baby. He doesn't even have the horsy competitiveness of Seabiscuit, subject of Hollywood's last inspirational-underdog-of-the-Depression...

On January 24, 2005, I stood on the sidewalk of Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., as the March for Life surged by. There was a small band of pro-choice counter-protestors, and I positioned myself just past them because I was curious about how pro-lifers would react to their presence. Now, I’m a convert from pro-choice to pro-life myself, and I have a strong interest in getting the two sides to understand each other’s positions more clearly. I was one of the founders of a group called The Common Ground Network for Life and Choice, which sponsored ongoing dialogue groups in...

This appears in this morning's Dallas Morning News. Have a very blessed Nativity. *** In this corner, ladies and gentlemen, we have Leonardo DiCaprio, adorable star of "Titanic," "Catch Me If You Can," and now, "The Aviator." In the other, we have - oh, pick a name. Clark Gable, Cary Grant, even Jimmy Stewart, for cryin' out loud. Notice any difference? Such comparisons are prompted by DiCaprio's newest release, "The Aviator," in which he portrays aeronautics engineer, Hollywood mogul, and big-time player Howard Hughes. As Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman puts it, DiCaprio is "a dynamo of an actor" but "at...

Recently a friend drew my attention to an exchange of letters between a mid-twentieth-century novelist and a lady. The lady thought the novelist was naughty and proceeded to lecture him about the unseemly content of his books. The novelist—and we can imagine bright, eager eyes over a mischievous grin—replied by thanking the woman profusely for rescuing him from error, and concluded by begging her to send a photo so he could see what true Christian charity looked like. A very satisfying put-down, in my friend’s opinion. It got me thinking, though. For one thing, this wasn’t a fair fight. Your...

A few years ago I was browsing in a thrift shop and came across a curious volume titled Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique. What's that got to do with Kinsey, the new film about sex researcher Alfred Kinsey? We'll get to that in a minute. First, let's look this specimen over merely in terms of its cinematic qualities, and set aside the sexual content. If this was a biography of any research scientist, we'd surely give it a solid A for visuals: costumes, lighting, props, cinematography, all contribute to a rich sense of environment and mood. A special gold...