A weekly collection of current news and issues in the church, country, and world.

This week we consider the Christian’s interaction with Hollywood:

Evangelicals and Hollywood Muck – Trevin Wax
Yet now in the 21st century, we are expected to find redeemable qualities in what would only be described by people throughout church history as “filth.”  What’s the point in decrying the exploitation of women in strip clubs and mourning the enslavement of men to pornography when we unashamedly watch films that exploit and enslave?  I do not claim to have this all figured out. But one thing I know: our pursuit of holiness must be the mark against which our pursuit of cultural engagement is measured.  If, like me, you’re conflicted about this issue, maybe it’s because we should be.

And then there is the new movie Noah.  Here are three takes – a simple movie review to get the basics, Ken Ham’s thoughts, and the final post which is fascinating, disturbing, and helps make sense of all the oddities in the movie (which I have not seen, and based on everything I have read and heard have no intention of seeing).

Noah: Film Review – Todd McCarthy (The Hollywood Reporter)
Noah will rile some for the complete omission of the name “God” from the dialogue, others for its numerous dramatic fabrications and still more for its heavy-handed ecological doomsday messages, which unmistakably mark it as a product of its time.

Ken Ham: The Unbiblical Noah Is a Fable of a Film – Time
Also, while the extreme wickedness of man was depicted, the real sin displayed in the film was the people’s destruction of the earth. Lost within the film’s extreme environmentalist message is that the actual sins of the preflood people were rebellion against God and man’s inhumanity to man. 

Sympathy For the Devil – Brian Mattson
Conservative-minded evangelicals write off the film because of the “liberties” taken with the text of Genesis, while a more liberal-minded group stands in favor of cutting the director some slack. After all, we shouldn’t expect a professed atheist to have the same ideas of “respecting” sacred texts the way a Bible-believer would.  Both groups have missed the mark entirely. Aronofsky hasn’t “taken liberties” with anything.  The Bible is not his text.