This article was first published on Culturewatch. © Tony Watkins, 2011 Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) sits brooding in the empty Oakland Coliseum stadium. He switches on his radio to listen for a few moments to the commentary of a baseball game, then turns it off. It’s only moments before he turns it on again. Off. […]

This is a repost to coincide with the cinema release of The Twilight Sage: Breaking Dawn (Part 1) This article was first published on Culturewatch.org. © Tony Watkins, 2010. Vampires are currently one of the biggest phenomena in popular culture. They are central to hit television series like True Blood, Being Human and The Vampire Diaries, but leading […]

A good warning from xkcd about the hazards of references in the online world: Related posts: No related posts.

This article was first published on Culturewatch.  ‘Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.’ Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) would probably agree with Tom Stoppard’s wry comment. Oliver is fifteen years old and anxious to be grown up, yet struggling with the transition to adulthood. He’s a rather serious boy, full of both […]

This article was first published on Culturewatch.  Life in a broken world is deeply unjust. Some people breeze through life with material security, happy marriages and hardly a care in the world. Others struggle through every miserable day. The central character in Paddy Considine's astonishing and harrowing debut as writer-director, Joseph (Peter Mullan), is a […]

It's taken me a while to get round to it, what with holidays and teaching in Norway, but I've now produced pdf and epub versions of my recent series of posts on films and worldviews. Related posts: Using film in Christian communication - part 2 Using film in Christian communication - part 6 Using film in […]

A little while ago I was filmed for version 2 of Glad You Asked, a DVD-based series of 8 sessions exploring the big questions of life, produced by the excellent Innovista. The first version was excellent, so I was delighted to be involved in version 2. It will be on sale very soon, but samples […]

This is the article on the book of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows which I wrote for Culturewatch. Warning: contains major plot spoilers. Ten years after Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone blasted onto the best-seller lists, J.K. Rowling has finally brought the series to a spectacular and moving conclusion with Harry Potter and the Deathly […]

Read the rest of this series. Why use film in Christian communication? Although aspects of the Christian worldview still do hang on in western culture, it’s all too obvious that very few films communicate much of it clearly. As I have already noted, films are primarily about telling a story, and often the worldview aspects […]

Worldview dimensions, continued Morality Some of the issues which I raised in the previous post, in relation to human nature are profoundly moral questions. What does it mean when we say that darkness and evil reside in the human heart, and that genuine goodness can be found there too? What makes for a good person, […]

Worldview dimensions, continued Humanity The second key aspect of worldviews is the nature of human beings. What does it mean to be human? This is closely bound up with the question of reality, of course. Are we simply physical beings – very clever animals or biological machines – or are we also spiritual beings? What […]

In the third part of this series on using films in Christian communication, we start looking at the five key dimensions of worldviews. Worldview dimensions There are five key dimensions of any worldview map to which we we need to pay very careful attention. They may seem a little abstract or theoretical at first. In […]

In the first post in this series, I reflected on life in the mediasphere, and the influence which films can have on us. In this post, we begin to get into the subject of worldviews. Film and worldviews While films tell stories and may have all kinds of things to say about love or politics […]

Life in the mediasphere Sean Penn’s wonderful film Into the Wild (2007) tells the true story of a young man who abandons normal middle class life, gives everything away and hitch-hikes to Alaska where he plans to live in the wilderness. He wants to be surrounded by a beautiful landscape, not a cityscape. Most of […]

Philip Seymour Hoffman is an extraordinarily talented actor, as well as a theatre director for the last thirteen years. Now he's turning his skills to directing a feature film for the first time with Jack Goes Boating, which is released in UK cinemas on 8 July. It looks like it's going to be a quirky […]

My friend Mark Meynell is a great film fan, an enthusiast for superheroes and an excellent communicator. So I'm excited to see his new venture - an audio documentary about the significance of superheroes. It's 30 minutes long and is at the bargain price of £1.29 on iTunes (see below). I've not yet had time […]

Extraordinary counter for social media activity around the world. 270 billion comments on Facebook in the last year. Over 1.5 million hours of video uploaded to YouTube in the last month. 16 million iPhone apps downloaded a day. About 10,000 tweets every second. Fascinating. (HT Big Bible) Related posts: Media in a post-truth world – […]

A conversation this morning made me realise I'd never posted this article here, which is why it's appearing some time after the film. This article was first published on Culturewatch. Beware: spoilers ahoy! One of the many changes which the Internet has brought into our lives is that it is remarkably easy to masquerade as […]

Fascinating extract fromt Jeremy Paxman's interview with Russell Brand: I came across this on Barry Cooper's website where he makes an interesting connection with Jonathan Edwards. He also highlights this particularly interesting quote: “Someone told me once that all desire is the desire to be at one with God in substitute form. So perhaps we […]

First published on Culturewatch © Tony Watkins 2011. The King's Speech is bookended by two speeches. The first is a disaster, a deeply humiliating experience for Prince Albert, Duke of York (Colin Firth), because of a severe stammer which had afflicted him since early childhood. He gives this speech on behalf of his father, King George […]

This article was first published in Idea magazine (May/June 2010) and on Culturewatch.org. © Tony Watkins, 2010. The legend of Robin Hood has an enduring fascination, and not just for small boys with bows and arrows. For over seven centuries, he has been an icon of struggle against unjust authority and of defending the interests […]