January 26, 2010

On the flight into Fort Myers, Florida, I looked down on a vast, oil-driven network of fast-food chains, malls and suburbs, little fiefdoms of fancy destined for ruin in the low-carbon future.

Every week tens of thousands of people attend virtual worship services that use an online ministry called LifeChurch.tv. A hundred churches worldwide are part of the LifeChurch network, and 23,000 additional churches have downloaded LifeChurch resources—for free—from open.lifechurch.tv. LifeChurch also has a multisite church network of its own, with 13 separate campuses connected by satellite.

Perhaps you find this kind of ministry disturbing. The faith represented by LifeChurch is largely disembodied, you might suspect—nothing more than virtual Christianity.

If, at last, both houses of Congress unite to pass health-care reform legislation, the bill emerging from the conference committee will have to be the result of still further compromising. Though some Who’ve struggled long and hard for health-care reform—such as former Vermont governor Howard Dean—now seem ready to abandon the current effort because they feel betrayed by the compromises made so far, the way toward reform is not likely to be advanced by waiting for more favorable circumstances.

It’s been some time since I donned my best professional earbuds to focus on a question of audio fidelity. But the band in question is the Beatles and the discs part of an ambitious remastering of the band’s catalog. Remastered Beatles material is as controversial as restoring a DaVinci—does the cleanup forever change the way the art will be perceived?

Back in 1994, when Peter Jackson was a relatively unknown director, he made the small but brilliant Heavenly Creatures, a tale about an “unhealthy” friendship between two teenage girls in 1950s New Zealand that led to bloody matricide. It remains my favorite film by this extremely talented filmmaker. Fifteen years later, after filming King Kong and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Jackson reenters the domain of the smaller film with The Lovely Bones, based on the 2002 novel by Alice Sebold.