Film | War for the Planet of the Apes | M
Review by Tim Lam
Perhaps a movie about talking apes is the last place audiences would expect to find Christian imagery. But War for the Planet of the Apes is not just one of the best films this year; it is also one of the most ...
Book | Tales from the Table: Stories from the Indigenous Hospitality House | Various Authors
Hospitality is a rich word. It is a concept, it is a practice, it’s complex and simple, profound and mundane. Tales from the Table: Stories from the Indigenous Hospitality House makes this rich, big, slippery word come ...
TV | The Handmaid’s Tale
Marketing material for SBS On Demand’s The Handmaid’s Tale depicts a young, disfigured woman sheathed in a demure scarlet cloak, her bonnet evoking 17th century Puritanism.
Paraphrasing 1 Corinthians 7:4, the poster starkly declares “your body is no longer your own”.
Book | Known to Social Services | Freya Barrington
This novel by Freya Barrington is not, in fact, written by Freya Barrington.
Barrington is the pen name used by a senior child protection social worker in a local authority in England. And while it is a work of fiction, Barrington clearly draws ...
Book | The World-Ending Fire | Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry is a novelist, poet and essayist, a self-described ‘crank’, a critic of technology and the idealism that comes with it, a Kentucky farmer who uses horses instead of a tractor, and a writer who uses a pencil rather than a computer.
...
Book | Thinking the Faith, Living the Faith | Chris Walker
A ministry colleague and friend tells me that only theologians are interested in theology, and many of the introductory books are heavy in both weight and terminology. By contrast, this very readable book (subtitled An introduction to Christian Theology) is relatively ...
BOOK | DEPENDS WHAT YOU MEAN BY EXTREMISM: GOING ROGUE WITH AUSTRALIAN DEPLORABLES | JOHN SAFRAN
John Safran, who is perhaps best known as an idiosyncratic TV prankster and provocateur, is asked what he is doing at an anti-Muslim rally organised by the far-right United Patriots Front.
As recent Hollywood legend goes, Baby Driver director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) dreamt up his film’s high concept as a student in the mid ‘90s. Moved by the garage rock bombast of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s (JSBX) 1994 single Bell Bottoms, Wright envisioned a muscular, Bullitt-style car-chase scene set to the track’s ...
After two film series – totalling five movies in fifteen years – and a celebrated Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) reintroduction in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, Spider-Man: Homecoming is aptly named.
Directed with ‘80s teen movie vigour by indie filmmaker Jon Watt (Cop Car), this Spider-reboot depicts Tom Holland’s 15-year-old polymath Peter Parker as he negotiates the pitfalls of juggling web-slinging ...
Book | God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World, And Why Their Differences Matter | Stephen Prothero
This 2011 book, written by Boston University religious studies Professor Stephen Prothero, promises to be a polemical broadside but mostly comprises a general introduction and overview of world religions.
Book | Off the Page | Clare Boyd-Macrae
Clare Boyd-Macrae has a gift – to turn the mundane and the routine into something of beauty, of grace, of God.
Her latest book, Off the Page, faith reflections, is a collection of her writing published in The Age Faith column and The ...
Book | Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation | James K.A. Smith
James K A Smith’s, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation is an accessible and valuable introduction to the nature and purpose of Christian worship. Drawing on contemporary understandings of the nature of the human being – ...
