The Christ and Pop Culture Podcast Network

In a lot of ways, the new musical In the Heights has finally hit theaters at the perfect time. As businesses fully reopen again and people prepare to get out of the house, what could be more of a fun summer activity than a fun summer musical. Crazy Rich Asians director Jon M. Chu helms this film version of the Lin-Manuel Miranda Broadway hit about an NYC neighborhood, its denizens, and their dream...

In this episode of Persuasion, Erin Straza and Hannah Anderson dig into the summer miniseries called Showing Up. Since 2004, Rachel has lived in Djibouti, a primarily Muslim country, where she and her husband run a school and where they enjoy cross-cultural, cross-religious relationships. Rachel shares from her recent release titled Pillars: How Muslim Friends Led Me Closer to Jesus. The conversat...

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States in March of 2020, none of us could have known the level of disruption we would be facing. In addition to the reality of illness and death, we also had to face a new way of going about our daily lives. Our daily routines were shattered and reformed to meet health protocols. Work, school, worship, community, sports, culture—every aspect of life was sh...

Disney tries to drum up some sympathy for the devil with their latest live-action film to delve into the background of an animated villain. In Cruella , Emma Stone stars as the fabulous fashion magnate in her younger years, matching wits with the icy Baroness von Hellman (Emma Thompson). So is Cruella actually evil, or was she just drawn that way? Wade and Kevin are on the case, analyzing the film...

What's the line between religious devotion and religious obsession? That's the question that Wade and Kevin explore with their review of Saint Maud , the religiously themed shocker from writer/director Rose Glass. Glass makes her feature debut with this story of a nurse named Maud (Morfydd Clark) providing hospice care to a dying professional dancer (Jennifer Ehle). Maud has a second mission on to...

"Sicaro" writer Taylor Sheridan returns to the director's chair with "Those Who Wish Me Dead" starring Angelina Jolie. Wade and Kevin review this thriller where a fire watcher (Jolie) is on the run with a young boy who is holding evidence in a complicated mob trial while pursued by two assassins while outrunning an out-of-control forest fire. Does the film burn bright ahead of the summer blockbust...

Over the past year, as communities implemented social distancing protocols, daily life came to a screeching halt. People stayed home to work remotely or attend virtual school. Without all our usual human hustle and bustle, wild creatures began roaming more freely. People began sharing photos of whales in harbors and goats running through towns. The conclusion? Nature is healing itself now that the...

Some days life cruises along the course of your well-laid plans and everything runs like clockwork. Other days—most days, perhaps?—life takes a detour off the beaten path and you get lost in the wilderness and stuck in the muck. Life works great, except when it doesn't, which is more often than not. So what can we do in response? Do we bother making plans when they are likely to get turned inside...

It's almost May, which means the action extravaganzas are finding their way to theaters and streaming for the blockbuster season. Warner Brothers kicks things off in a big, bloody way with its stab at resurrecting the Mortal Kombat franchise for filmgoers. This time, the story they build around the gory video game brawler involves a washed-up MMA fighter named Cole (Lewis Tan) who discovers that h...

With a slight lull coming between awards season and blockbuster season, Wade and Kevin pause for a retro review of a film regarded by many critics as the best directorial one-off in cinema history. Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter offers an iconic villain in Robert Mitchum's Harry Powell, a corrupt preacher in Depression-era West Virginia who sets his sights on a widow and her two childr...

Wade and Kevin round out their Oscar coverage with a review of the final remaining Best Picture nominee: Emerald Fennell's scathing Promising Young Woman . Starring Carey Mulligan as a vigilante of unconventional methods, the film takes dead aim at sexual predators, their enablers, and the culture that empowers both groups. The guys also turn their attention to the upcoming ceremony and offer thei...

Oscar season may be long over, but the Oscars themselves are just peeking over the horizon. Wade and Kevin catch up with one of the Best Picture nominees that eluded them at the end of 2020: Florian Zeller's film adaptation of his own play The Father . Featuring Anthony Hopkins as an elderly man dealing with dementia and Olivia Colman as his long-suffering daughter, the film pairs its melodrama wi...

With the coming of spring, there's a light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, which means two things: movie theaters are becoming an option once again, and blockbusters are being released to take advantage of them. One of the most anticipated of the season so far is Adam Wingard's follow-up to Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Kong: Skull Island , Godzilla vs. Kong , which pits the titular beasts...

It's not every day that a franchise's fanbase is able to will a movie into existence, but that's exactly the rare occurrence that is under consideration on this week's episode. With Wade away from the hosting chair, Kevin is joined by Detroit critic Chris Williams to discuss Zack Snyder's Justice League (not to be confused with its predecessor, 2017's Justice League ). After the 2017 film saw dire...

In the last episode, Erin and Hannah discussed the hurdles and struggles we face in our attempts to cultivate goodness, finding another point of shared experience in the brokenness of the world. In keeping with that conversation, we're taking a brief Interlude from our larger series, FINDING COMMON GROUND, and invite you to listen in as Hannah Anderson reads an excerpt from her recently released b...

Disney+ keeps the big releases rolling with Raya and the Last Dragon , an animated adventure about a fantasy world teetering on the edge of apocalypse, with magical dragons holding the key to saving humanity from encroaching outside evil ... and also from itself. Featuring Kelly Marie Tran ( The Last Jedi ) and Awkwafina ( The Farewell ) as the two title characters, the film celebrates the virtue...

Last week we discussed our shared call to cultivate goodness in the world. While that is true, it's not the whole picture. Because as we work, we also find another shared experience. We all struggle in our work. We encounter barriers and failures. We grow weary. The world experiences disasters and pandemics. And we are left holding the brokenness of this life, wondering what to do next. Learn more...

On this week's special double-length episode, we offer something for lovers of blockbuster sci-fi/horror and indie sci-fi dramas. Wade and Kevin sit down with fellow critic Sarah Welch-Larson to talk about her brand-new book, Becoming Alien: The Beginning and End of Evil in Science Fiction's Most Idiosyncratic Film Franchise . In a fascinating conversation, they discuss the intersection of the Ali...

In this episode, Erin and Hannah explore our shared desire to find meaning through our work and in life. Our work may be more mental than physical, but whatever it is, we hope it means something more than a paycheck. We want to thrive on all fronts, to see our work take off and produce a harvest we can enjoy and share with others. To illustrate this truth, Sarah Pabody from Triple Wren Farms share...

Seeing & Believing closes out Black History Month with a look at the buzzed-about new film that is based on the true story of the death of Fred Hampton. Shaka King's Judas and the Black Messiah features two powerhouse performances from Get Out 's Daniel Kaluuya as Hampton and LaKeith Stanfield as Bill O'Neal, the man who worked to bring down Hampton's revolutionary operation in Chicago from th...

Communicating with others is something we're born doing. We emerge from the womb with limited skills, of course. Our skills grow in time, from wails to words and eventually to full sentences and fully nuanced, complex ideas. But that's not all it takes to communicate well. We can use all the skills at our disposal—verbal and nonverbal—and still experience a breakdown in communication with others....

Death has been a constant thought this past year, due to the pandemic that continues to rage among us and around the globe. It's rare in our society to think much about the end of our days. We tend to press on with our plans until death disrupts us, when it jolts us to the reality that all of us are living on borrowed time and breath. From dust we came, to dust we will return. The earth grounds us...

Valentine's Day is just around the corner, but the only love affair that Seeing & Believing has time for is that between Ralph Fiennes and archaeological excavations. Netflix's The Dig tells the true story of how a widow (Carey Mulligan) teamed up with a working-class excavation expert (Fiennes) to make one of Great Britain's greatest archaeological discoveries on the eve of World War II. Wade...

Erin and Hannah kick off a new series called Finding Common Ground . Each episode will consider a different aspect of natural revelation and how the world around us gives us the common ground we seek—and desperately need—with our fellow humans. Despite the rifts we feel with others ideologically, there is still much we have in common. By turning our eyes to the creation and its rhythms, we find co...

It's not every day that a new Denzel Washington-starring film gets released, especially when that film has been a quarter-century in the making. John Lee Hancock's screenplay for The Little Things has been floating around since the mid-1990s, and it's finally been released now, on HBO Max, with Hancock himself at the helm and a freshly minted Golden Globes nomination under its belt. Washington sta...