Feb 20, 2015 | Uncategorized
Act One, Inc., exists to create a community of Christian professionals for the entertainment industry who are committed to artistry, professionalism, meaning, and prayer, so that through their lives and work they may be witnesses of Christ and the Truth to their fellow artists and to the global culture.
Graduates are prepared for careers marked by integrity and excellence, in writers’ rooms, on sets, and in studio and network offices.
Keynotes:
- Artistry – Mastering the craft of storytelling to move audiences through the radiance, wholeness, and harmony of beauty.
- Professionalism – Exceeding the best practices of the industry in excellence, honesty, trustworthiness, hard work, and a “no excuses” mentality.
- Meaning – Telling stories of substance to beckon audiences toward truth, goodness, and even faith.
- Prayer – Sustaining a soul-nourishing spiritual journey of holiness and love made possible by individual and community prayer.
Feb 20, 2015 | Uncategorized
If you’ve been in a grocery store recently or anywhere magazines are displayed, not to mention the internet, you can’t help but know that Olympian Bruce Jenner has decided to become a woman. It is inconceivable that such words would ever be written, but alas that is where we are in 21st Century America; men and women can decide they no longer want to be the sex they were born, and they are cheered by our cultural elite. However, when it comes to so called sexual orientation, these same people say that simply cannot be changed, and to say that it can be changed is sheer bigotry. And we know how modern America treats bigots. (more…)
Feb 18, 2015 | Uncategorized
It is one thing to argue that our rights are not God-given and that the Declaration, the founders, Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and so many other great documents and figures in American history were wrong to claim they were. Those who hold this view, of course, need to explain the basis for believing in and protecting unalienable rights and human dignity if they are not grounded in “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Absent a Creator, what is the argument against capriciousness, injustice, and tyranny? How does one create a system of justice and make the case against, say, slavery, if you begin with two propositions: one, the universe was created by chance; and two, it will end in nothing? How do you derive a belief in a moral law that is binding on you and others apart from theism? How do you get from the “is” to the “ought”?
— Peter Wehner, “God, Our Rights, and the Modern Liberal Mind”
Feb 17, 2015 | Uncategorized
Soon to be presidential candidate Scott Walker took what he thought was an apolitical trip to England recently to promote the fruit of Wisconsin labor. If you are running for president, nothing is apolitical, especially if you’re a Republican. During a question and answer session during the trip he was asked the completely irrelevant question of his views on evolution. This was of course a gotcha question so the liberal media could pounce on yet another anti-science, religious conservative who clearly isn’t qualified for the highest office in the land, or so the narrative goes. (more…)
Feb 10, 2015 | Uncategorized
Downton Abbey is utterly a product of today, and this dissonance is revealed in the script as its writers wander in our 21st-century moral wilderness while comfortably making pronouncements on the moral failings of people who lived in the previous one. These failings aren’t the same as our own; we are far more enlightened these days than those numbskulls who lived one hundred years ago, locked as they were in the British social hierarchy. No, their failings are ones of race and class and gender and sexual freedom, stuff we’ve since figured out. More or less.
Downton Abbey is a sort of playhouse, its characters manipulated by writers in the way paper dolls are manipulated by children: one-dimensional figures propped up on various pieces of furniture, the primary function of which is to show off regular costume changes and to serve as mouthpieces for whoever is controlling them. So it is for all the various characters that populate Downton Abbey. No matter how many are added or taken away with each successive season, every player, from the head of household to the lowliest undercook, is trapped in their own set of behaviors, reduced, in laymen’s terms, to having “issues”—issues which are understood with total clarity by 21st century viewers, existing as we do in our enlightened age.
–S.D. Kelly, “The One-Dimensional Humanity of ‘Downton Abbey’”
Feb 7, 2015 | Uncategorized
If you’ve ever read C.S. Lewis you’ll know he was a genius. I’m currently reading Christian Reflections, which are essays and addresses he gave about assorted topics. When he gets into full on genius mode I have to reread a passage numerous times to try to understand it, and often even then I can’t fully grasp what he’s trying to say. I know it’s profound, but I can’t seem to wrap my brain around it. At other times when I can get what he’s saying, his insights can be breathtaking, and strangely enough obvious. One piece in the book with many such insights is an essay called, “The Funeral of A Great Myth,” that being the Myth of progress, of evolution metaphysically considered. The facts of the science of evolution are not the point, but rather how the imagination extends and distorts the meaning of evolution all beyond its ability to predict.
(more…)
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