The New Crux Blogs

The editor of our new online publication (print edition forthcoming), Crux Magazine, has started three blogs over at the magazine’s website. New Adventures in Sci-Phi follows developments in science and philosophy, Signs of the Times features general commentary on culture, and Situation Critical collects reviews of popular culture.

There are several writers involved with the blogs, including Bobby Maddex (the editor of Crux), Eric Scheske, Hunter Baker, Leslie Sillars, John Coleman, and Denyse O’Leary.

For readers who want more on the film director M. Night Shyamalan, John Coleman’s latest contribution to Situation Critical is a defense of Shyamalan’s 2002 movie Signs (an excerpt follows):

Movies like Signs are few and far between, and believers in the supernatural of all shapes and sizes should applaud these doubters of materialism when they appear. “Why?” you ask?

What are the primary problems in the Western world today? OK, social security, terrorism, and global warming—sure; but dig into the psychology of young people and old-fogies alike, and it seems that the former culture of Sophocles, Homer, and Orson Wells is suffering primarily from a wicked lack of imagination.

We are all materialists now. Sure, there are remnants of pagan mysticism, and there are some die-hard believers in theistic deities, but the vast majority of Americans and Europeans believe more in the idea of world peace than in fairies, angels, and aliens; and the world is worse for it. How can you have real theistic faith without a belief in angels or their opposites? How can you profess to true meaning in life without the idea that you can somehow intervene in these otherworldly affairs? How can you make it through an existence in which the kings are despots and fashion designers without some vague notion that they are poor imitations of your own princely soul—a soul that at the will of “Aslan” or “Gandalf” just might rise to help save the worlds of men?