It verges on blasphemy to question “The Blind Side.”

Not only has the movie garnered Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Actress, it has also made an unexpected $241 million – and counting. What’s more, the picture has been wholeheartedly embraced by scores of American churchgoers. Sermons are even being fashioned around it.

I thought the film was a crock. Yes, I realize it is based on a true story, that of Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy, a wealthy, white Christian couple in Memphis, Tenn., who took in a homeless black teen named Michael Oher and nurtured him to an eventual career in the National Football League. Good for all three of them – they should be proud of taking huge risks and defeating overwhelming odds. I only wish “The Blind Side” had given us an honest sense of their sacrifice and struggle.

An Atlanta family has received a lot of publicity for their decision to sell their big home, buy a smaller one and use the profits to help those in need.  The Salwen family says it all started when their 14-year-old daughter Hannah became upset with the unequal chances for people based on their wealth.  By selling their home, the family used the $800,000 to do a lot of work in two dozen villages in Ghana.

Below are two news stories about the Salwen’s, who have now written a book called “The Power of Half.”

From what I’ve read about the family, I can’t really tell you about their faith commitment.  Regardless, it begs the question: Could you majorly downsize your life, like this family did, to help the poor?

“What are you staring at?” a disheveled mom at the grocery story hissed at me.

Before I could answer, she spun around, and demanded that the clerk apologize—again—for accidentally bumping her cart with her newborn inside.

“I said I was really sorry,” the cashier replied meekly. “It was an accident.”

The angry mom turned her rage back towards me. She wagged her finger at Evie, my three year old, and Caleb, my four year old. “You’re the one with the crazy kids,” she yelled.

What had been a small supermarket mishap, one I hadn’t really been involved in, had suddenly turned ugly.

Caleb, who had been staring at the angry mom, turned his attention to me.

I paused, holding back my fury toward this mother for involving my children, and turned my back to her.

We’ve got ourselves a little trend here at Think Christian.  We have another guest blogger who we really liked and asked to be a part of  our team of contributors.  So help me welcome Amy Adair.  I think she’s a great writer with an interesting perspective.  Here’s what she said about herself:

Amy lives in Lombard, Illinois. She is a mother, a wife, a writer, an editor, and a Jesus follower. She has written children’s books, a teen magazine column, interviews, and adoption applications. She is the proud mother to two boys who are 7 and 4. Her latest adventure led her to Beijing, China, with her husband Jonathan this summer. There they met their newest addition to the family, a two year old little girl. Amy is currently working a children’s book about adoption. You can read about her life, faith, and the ups, downs, and joys of motherhood at www.1001tears.blogspot.com.

Here are a couple of videos to get you through the weekend from the good folks at Worship House Media.

The first is for all of those people who get a little caught up in the Hallmark side of Valentine’s Day.

And this second one are some killer marriage tips from the comedy duo Johnny and Chachi.

Any thoughts?

I had a good discussion with my students a few weeks ago after we read Jonathan Edwards’ classic sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”  If you haven’t read the sermon in a while, you might remember the feeling of simultaneous boredom and terror from being assigned the reading in high school or college, or perhaps you remember the stand-out image, of God dangling us like a spider over a fire.  Many of my students thought that the fire and brimstone approach was probably not the best approach to evangelism, and wished Edwards would have spent more time explaining God’s love and how to avoid hell.

This got me thinking about different strategies for presenting the gospel to others.  Is one strategy better than another for helping others to understand the story of God’s love for us, and our great need for God?  Then I remembered the work that some of my colleagues do in health communication, trying to understand how people respond to various persuasive strategies. There’s a lot of research on how to get people to understand, believe and act on health information that will make them healthier. In some sense, information about spiritual health has a lot in common with information about physical health, though we cannot gather scientific evidence about God the same way we can about H1N1. In both cases, the goal is to deliver information to people that we hope they will act on.

Leading up to this year’s Super Bowl, there was some controversy about a pro-life ad from Focus on the Family.  The commercial featured Heisman Trophy Winner Tim Tebow and his mom Pam, who  talked about her decision not to have an abortion (without actually saying the word abortion).   Pro-choice groups criticized CBS for accepting the ad, which was the first “political” ad the network ever approved for the big game.

So what did you think?  Was the ad effective?  Did it live up to the hype?

(Reminder: Quick Thought comments should be short.  Maybe a few sentences but no more than 100 words or so.)

God doesn’t make an appearance in “Wings of Desire,” a 1987 art film with angels that has been recently rereleased by Criterion on DVD, yet the movie still made me reconsider the way He might view the world. Maybe, just maybe, we occasionally entertain Him.

Directed by German filmmaker Wim Wenders, “Wings of Desire” is set in Berlin not long before the fall of the Wall. In this drab, industrial city, a host of unseen angels silently pass among the citizens. Much of their watching is of an empathetic, consoling manner, which is how I usually imagine God views us. When a distraught commuter hangs his head on the subway, for example, an angel gives an encouraging embrace. Without knowing why, the man’s spirits are briefly lifted out of despair.

The angels can’t always intervene, however. In one of the picture’s saddest interludes, one of them tries and fails to prevent a man from leaping off a roof. This sense of helplessness is one of the reasons an angel named Damiel (Bruno Ganz) declares that he has had enough of being a heavenly creature. “I don’t want to hover above,” he says. “I’d rather feel a weight within.”

The recovery community has a saying, “expectations are preconceived resentments”. The angrier or safer people feel the freer they become to share their resentments and many of these resentments are against God. Usually these resentments are based upon some history of hurt. God’s providential governance of the universe appears overly haphazard and risky and we quickly complain that if we were given God’s power we could out perform his management choices. We are more than uncomfortable about God’s record of providential management and this leads to doubts about God’s existence, goodness, and power and sometimes explodes into outright rejection.

While we complain about God’s providence we experience, we can fairly easily embrace notions of natural evolution as being somehow good. While we’re uncomfortable with God’s governance over our personal or communal narratives we’re more comfortable imagining his evolutionary management of the development of life on planet earth. Despite liking to think of ourselves as being animal friendly, giving to the ASPCA or choosing eggs from free range chickens over those raised in cages, we’re surprisingly non-judgmental towards evolution for the wholesale massacre of the majority of living species that have ever called this planet home. Somehow I can’t let God off the hook for not stopping a painful episode in my life but I can easily give him a pass for the enormous historical destructions wrought by asteroid strikes or volcanic eruptions. What does this say about the biases expressed in my evaluation of God’s rulership?

After watching last season’s Lost finale a couple times, the opening conversation between Jacob and his unnamed nemesis have begun to remind me of the Book of Job. ThinkChristian blogger Jerod Clark wrote last year about how these figures seem like God (Jacob) and Satan (Man in Black). And when they vaguely reference a long-standing disagreement over humans, I am reminded of Satan’s conjecture regarding Job’s faith and God’s offer to allow him to test it.

“You’re trying to prove me wrong,” says the Man in Black.

“You are wrong,” says Jacob.

In a season that turned Lost’s religious symbolism and blatant references up to 11, this wasn’t all that has struck me as I’ve rewatched those final two hours.