The Christian Century

John McCain was the most innovative and exciting campaigner of the presidential primary season. His positive treatment from the media led one of his aides to observe that the media had been his political base. But now McCain is out of the presidential race, in part because, as Phyllis Schlafly of the conservative Eagle Forum said, “People don’t want to elect an angry candidate.”

If you want to correctly interpret the news, stop assuming that the mainstream media know it all; pay attention instead to voices speaking quietly over in the corner. Read, for example, people like Amira Hass, a Jewish reporter who covers the West Bank and Gaza for Ha’aretz, a Jerusalem newspaper.

Bringing Out the Dead, director Martin Scorcese’s frenetic examination of three days in the life of a paramedic, is easily my choice for the best film of 1999.

Palestinians recognize the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks for what they are: the mopping-up process following a power struggle that Israel won. The spoils of victory are evident in the satellite photographs Jad Isaac recently projected for a group of visiting journalists.

From a trip to Havana in the fall of 1980, I returned with two small statues of African female warriors, one with a machete, the other carrying a rifle. These were gifts from a government official who handed them to me after I stopped to admire them.

There is a story in the Book of Genesis, rarely examined by modern readers, that is so pertinent to today's headlines that it should be required reading for any journalist reporting on the tribal conflicts that are at the heart of modern warfare. I reexamined the story after watching La Genese, a film from Mali, directed by Cheick Oumar Sissoko.

Cuban film director Fernando Pérez was inspired to make Life Is to Whistle by the work of modernist painter René Magritte, in whose work "reality does not stop being reality, but is, at once, another reality." Magritte's paintings have been described as "elaborate fantasies constructed around commonplace situations." Life Is to Whistle is an energetic look at commonplace situa

Rarely does blatant commercial hypocrisy sit so close to artistic excellence as was the case at the Hollywood screening of Stanley Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut.

Vice-President Al Gore chose a safe venue—a Salvation Army gathering in Atlanta—to start talking about religion. But he knew he had to go beyond such comfortable surroundings if he was to make a serious case that "without values of conscience, our political life degenerates."