Jan 30, 2015 | Uncategorized
Christina Lee has a heart for missions, and when she was younger went to China to follow her heart. Prior to that she had worked in Hollywood but felt compelled to share the gospel with people on the other side of the world. While there, however, she had a revelation that Hollywood was as much a mission field and in need of the gospel as any country on earth, and she followed her heart back. She realized then and still does, that the influence of Hollywood around the world, for good and ill, is something Christians cannot afford to ignore.
Now she is the President of Act One, a community of Christian professionals in the entertainment industry. In addition to ministry work, it is also a training program for aspiring filmmakers, providing in-class instruction from professionals, internships, and practical experience. The program is divided into two branches: the Writing Program (with several advanced tiers for mentorship-driven workshops) and the Executive Program, which trains students in the development and production side of the business. Both programs typically take place side-by-side in the summer.
In addition to her work with Act One, she is also an international independent producer who has collaborated with filmmakers from around the world. Her most recent producing credits include To Save A Life, The Least of These, and Flesh: Bought & Sold in the U.S., a documentary about the widely overlooked yet widespread practice of human trafficking in the United States. Christina was Production Supervisor for the highly acclaimed, 2012 Oscar-winning film The Artist. She was Manager of Digital Production at Rhythm & Hues Studios (R&H), which recently won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects for their ground-breaking visual effects work on Life of Pi. While at R&H in digital production management, Christina also worked on over a dozen films including The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, Happy Feet, and most recently Hunger Games, Snow White and the Huntsman, and Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters.
Christina has a passion for making films with profound themes. She is an alumnus of Act One: Writing for Hollywood program and has served on its Advisory Board for the Executive/Producing Program. She is also a member of the Producers Guild of America and has been serving on the guild’s National Board of Directors and AP Council Delegates for the last 6 years. She recently received the AP Council Commitment Award, the highest award given by the AP Council.
Jan 28, 2015 | Uncategorized
We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind of self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the ten commandments of God.
–James Madison.
Jan 27, 2015 | Uncategorized
The last month or so I’ve been seeing pictures online of what is obviously a man dressed up like a women promoting a TV show called Transparent. Apparently it won some Golden Globe nominations last month. I had an inkling why. Doesn’t it figure that in 21st Century America the first streaming series from Amazon is about a transgendered person. This is obviously the next great wave of cultural transformation brought to us by our secular progressive cultural elites. Obviously we need to become more tolerant and accepting of minorities and those different from us. Notice what this show is about:
“Transparent,” the latest gift from the streaming Gods, is being released in its entirety Friday, the better for binge watching one half-hour episode after another.
The Amazon series, created by “Six Feet Under” and “The United States of Tara” alum Jill Soloway, revolves around an L.A. family that would give Fox News anchors a cow if they stumbled across it: The father (Jeffrey Tambor) has been secretly dressing as a woman for years, and eldest daughter Sarah (Amy Landecker), a stay at home mom with kids, begins screwing around with her lesbian lover from college soon after they meet again. Then there’s music producer Josh (Jay Duplass), who has had a secret affair with the family’s baby sitter, and is carrying on with a young musician client Kaya (Alison Sudol).
Youngest Ali (“Girls” co-star Gaby Hoffmann) has no job and questionable judgment.
The Pfefferman family, is other words, is gloriously unconventional. Even better, it is not studiously so. Family members can’t help but follow their hearts wherever they lead them; they are not trying to create waves.
How quaint. This is quintessential post-modern America, post-Christian in every way. The ethical imperative, what is truly virtuous in our day is to “follow our hearts” because there is nothing more important than self-fulfillment, of being “authentic” to our true selves. This is of course absurd because the writer would never say the rapist or racists or sexist or thief or murderer or bully or any person with any number of such vicious actions or attitudes should “follow their hearts.”
The last thing a fallen sinful human being should do is “follow their heart.” As we’re told in Jeremiah 17:9: “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” Yet American culture is awash in such blather about being true to ourselves. The secularist cannot have it both ways. They claim some kind of objective morality doesn’t actually exist, but themselves impose a moral standard because some moral must be imposed one way or the other; the question is whose or what moral standard.
It will great when some day sophisticated and talented Christians are making TV shows that deal with reality as reality really is. Until then we have to put up with characters like our transgendered hero that “follow their heart” and then be told this is the pinnacle of virtue.
Jan 24, 2015 | Uncategorized
Whenever we come upon these matters in secular writers, let that admirable light of truth shining in them teach us that the mind of man, though fallen and perverted from its wholeness, is nevertheless clothed and ornamented with God’s excellent gifts. If we regard the Spirit of God as the sole fountain of truth, we shall neither reject the truth itself, nor despise it wherever it shall appear, unless we wish to dishonor the Spirit of God.
–John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (p. 273)
Jan 23, 2015 | Uncategorized
A critical part of Christians effectively engaging the culture is something called apologetics, which simply means defending the veracity of the gospel and Christian worldview. The term comes from I Peter 3:15:
But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.
The Greek word for “to give an answer,” or sometimes translated as a defense is ἀπολογίαν, apologia. Thus the term apologetics. We cannot be effective witnesses for Christ in the culture unless we know what we believe, i.e. theology and doctrine, and why we believe what we believe, and are able to effectively, and winsomely, defend it.
One of the reasons Christians can have confidence in what they believe is that we can be reasonably certain that what we read in our New Testaments is what was actually written by who it was written by. Even when they disagree with the who part, non-believing scholars agree that the text of the New Testament we have comes to us pretty much accurately from the first century. We know this because of a science called textual criticism, which simply means how we handle ancient texts to get as close as possible to the original manuscripts, in our case what was actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, et al.
As new discoveries have been made over the last century the case for the validity of the New Testament text has only grown stronger. Now we have an exciting new discovery that has given us the oldest copy of a gospel text known to exist. This fragment from the gospel of Mark, the earliest written of the four, has been dated to before 90 AD. The implications for our faith are too deep to go into in a blog post, but they are multifaceted and encouraging. You can find out more at this book review of Craig Blomberg’s The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, and if you’re so inclined read the book. It’s on my Wish List.
Jan 22, 2015 | Uncategorized
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a lifelong New Deal liberal and accomplished social scientist, warned that “the issue of welfare is not what it costs those who provide it but what it costs those who receive it.” As a growing portion of the population succumbs to the entitlement state’s ever-expanding menu of temptations, the costs, Eberstadt concludes, include a transformation of the nation’s “political culture, sensibilities, and tradition,” the weakening of America’s distinctive “conceptions of self-reliance, personal responsibility, and self-advancement,” and perhaps a “rending of the national fabric.” As a result, “America today does not look exceptional at all.”
George Will: “The harm incurred by a mushrooming welfare state”
Christina Lee has a heart for missions, and when she was younger went to China to follow her heart. Prior to that she had worked in Hollywood but felt compelled to share the gospel with people on the other side of the world. While there, however, she had a revelation that Hollywood was as much a mission field and in need of the gospel as any country on earth, and she followed her heart back. She realized then and still does, that the influence of Hollywood around the world, for good and ill, is something Christians cannot afford to ignore.
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