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The Learning Channel’s 10-part series “The Monastery” has a couple of advantages over your run-of-the-mill reality show. One is that it is shot at Christ in the Desert, a Roman Catholic monastery in northern New Mexico. TLC’s cameras capture the astounding beauty of the canyon setting’s piercing blue skies, hawks dawdling overhead and the lacework…

We like when things are neatly packaged and easily grasped, one character in Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of our Fathers” tells us: good and evil, heroes and villains. “Most of the time they aren’t. But we think they are.” The movie, opening today, shows us the complex and messy depiction of the Battle of Iwo Jima.…

“One anchor, five correspondents, zero credibility.” Now that’s a tagline that speaks to me. “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” celebrated its 10th anniversary this week. What? You’ve never watched “The Daily Show?” You don’t know what you’re missing. Being the “One News Organization with No Credibility to Lose” has worked well for this fake…

What are the odds that Matteo the talking diary, a pen named Quill Simona, and two doves called Piccolo and Fiona will become beloved animated characters just like Bambi, Pinocchio, or Winnie the Pooh? The producers of “John Paul II, The Friend of Humanity” are hoping so. The new Vatican-approved film, revealed at a press…

Video of last night’s appearance on “The Colbert Report” of David Kuo, Beliefnet’s Washington editor and author of the new book “Tempting Faith“:

The poor Anti-Defamation League. The champions of tolerance–sworn especially to fight anti-Semitism–have been reduced by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen to fretting in a press release that the cute, totally ironic anti-Semitic digs in Cohen’s new movie, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” might be “too sophisticated for the…

We have a new Superfriend! In The New York Times last weekend, columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote about Muslim feminism (yes, there is such a thing, and Muslim feminism has many followers). What really caught my eye as intriguing, though, was his mention of Rima Khoreibi, who is “an author from Dubai who wrote a children’s…

It’s pretty early in the new television to be speculating about which series will be cancelled, but after only two weeks on the air, the football drama “Friday Night Lights” already might be in danger. The show, which follows the challenges and triumphs of the fictional Dillon Panther football team, has received stellar reviews but…

I’ve written here before that Harriet Hayes, the evangelical Christian character on “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” is a credible Christian character. It’s a claim I’ve defended to evangelical viewers who think she’s just an excuse for writer Aaron Sorkin to say that he’s presented a balanced view of American Christianity–so he can otherwise…

Like any serious rockers, Christian musicians have had flings with their keyboard players, divorced their cokehead husbands, and had fans sue them for being too drunk to perform. But as this story from The Onion—still the country’s most reliable fictional news source—shows, Christian bands are still far, far back on the road to credibility.

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