HeyJaredHoly Pop Culture, Batman!
Creating Conversations at the Intersection of Faith and Pop Culture
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
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- Sep 7, 2026
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- Jul 3, 2026
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Death at a Church Potluck (opens the original)
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This one stands on two essays I’ve already written — my piece on The Odyssey and my piece on The Rivals of Amziah King. You don’t need either to follow along. But that’s where I make the cases I’m building on here, and I’d start there if you have twenty minutes.Early in The Rivals of Amziah King, Amziah walks Kateri down a potluck table like a docent working a gallery.He goes dish by dish. This one’s the truth. That
The Rivals of Amziah King (opens the original)
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Matthew McConaughey plays an Oklahoma beekeeper named Amziah King.Not Amaziah. Amziah. One letter short of a king of Judah who reigned twenty-nine years, lost a war he started, and died running. Andrew Patterson’s film never mentions him. Its religion is a man who goes to church and scolds himself when he curses.I’m not decoding. I’m setting a rollicking Oklahoma crime musical beside a three-thousand-year-old humiliation that shares most of its name, and leaning on both until something gives.In
A Killer Orgasm (opens the original)
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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is not a slasher movie. It’s cosplaying one — really well, for two hours, and not at all in the way I walked in braced for.I mean that as a compliment.Here’s what you need before the lights go down: Jane Schoenbrun’s new film assumes you already speak two dead languages. The first is slasher grammar — the rules this genre has run on since the late ‘70s, whether you learned them in a film class or just absorbed them growing up. The second is the specific, liti
Spider-man was Radicalized... and No One Noticed (opens the original)
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Past the midpoint of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, there’s a shot of Peter Parker drinking coffee with his mask on.He’s rolled it up just under his nose to get the mug to his mouth — the exact minimum amount of face a man can expose and still ingest a liquid. Frank Castle, a person whose entire personality is a gun, looks at this and correctly identifies it as insane behavior.When the Punisher is the reasonable one at your breakfast table, something has gone sideways.Brand New Day skips
Box Scores Don't Care About Your Feelings (opens the original)
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I.I stood in front of the photograph for a long time. Jackie Robinson at the dugout rail, bat in one hand, ball in the other, and a bank of white boys folded over the fence toward him — cameras up, mouths open, one of them with his whole arm out like he’s reaching for something holy. They are not tolerating him. They are not including him. They love him, uncomplicatedly, the way you love someone who is about to win you a pennant.<a class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img" href="https://substack
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