Are Kids' Movies Too Violent?

In a recent interview, beloved actor Dick Van Dyke, who is currently filming a Mary Poppins sequel scheduled for release next year, raised a concern that the graphic violence and scary intensity of today’s video games and movies are having a detrimental influence on generations of young viewers.

So many productions today are “all gunfire and killing,” said Van Dyke. “Violence and entertainment have almost became interchangeable.” He worries that this toxic ingredient incites violent behavior and affects impressionable young people who “idolize it as a romantic way of life.”

“When I was a teenager,” Van Dyke explained, “I modelled myself after the way Fred Astaire or Cary Grant dressed. Now kids emulate street gangs. They like to dress like hoods. That’s just a reversal. They’re picking the wrong role models.”  

‘Tough and Tender’ Mr. T’s Amazing Grace

Nothing tugs at the heartstrings quite as unexpectedly as when a stoic tough guy reveals his tender side, and there is no tougher guy than Mr. T. On last Monday night’s episode of Dancing With the Stars, a show normally notable for its sexy and flamboyant (if sometimes awkward) dance routines, the A-Team star moved everyone with a quiet, unassuming performance of praise and gratitude for the faith that got him through his bout with cancer.

In the episode called “Most Memorable Year Week,” the celebrity participants chose the most important year in their lives and danced to a song that represents that year for them. The 64-year-old Mr. T (“My first name is ‘Mr,’ my middle name is ‘period,’ last name is ‘T.’”) chose 1995, the year he was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer.

Nonie Darwish Demolishes the False Equivalence Between Christianity and Islam

Several years ago I was expressing to a friend of mine what I assumed was the undeniable fact that the world has an Islam problem. Her kneejerk response, ingrained by years of Progressive indoctrination, was, “But don’t you think Christianity is just as bad?”

Tragically, this continues to be the instinct among the multiculturalist multitudes in the West: a reflexive defense of Islam and an equally swift condemnation of Christianity. As jihad in all its forms – violent, cultural, legal – advances in the West, willfully blind defenders of Islam keep insisting that it is one of the world’s great Abrahamic religions, that all religions have extremists, and that, if anything, the colonialism and intolerance of the Christian West is the bigger problem. Our cultural elites demonize and fear-monger about the Christian right in ways they would never dream of characterizing Muslims.