Jim Talent has produced a sobering (and indeed eye-opening) account of Chinese designs complete with graphs showing how American military power has radically diminished in comparison to the Chinese. Talent's article offers a major survey of what America is up against at this very moment. No wonder there were so many photos of President Xi Jinping smiling when he met with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
I have written before about the growth of China’s military power and the decline of American strength because of the defense cuts in recent years. Here is a graphic illustration, compiled from open sources, of how that shift in power is affecting the Pacific theater:
UPDATE 4/8/2017 - I saw the movie today and agree with both Ed Morrissey's review (below) and that of Steven D. Graydanus'. Both reviews acknowledge that this faith-based film evidences the genre's maturation. One can watch it without cringing. I found the acting very good, and the emotional responses of Erika Christensen (who played Strobel's wife, Leslie), particularly outstanding.
Here is a trailer followed by Lee Strobel's talk at a church last month in which he tells his story in his own words.
Original post:
Ed Morrissey, whose opinion I regard highly, gives five stars to The Case for Christ movie. It opens in theaters across the U.S. tonight. Strobel is the author of the best-selling book (over 14 million copies) The Case for Christ. Here is Morrissey's review:.
The faith-based film industry has both grown and matured over the last several years as filmmakers and investors see enthusiasm from audiences for these offerings. The new film The Case for Christ, based on the real-life conversion story of former Pulitzer-nominated journalist Lee Strobel and taken from his 1998 book of the same title, provides further evidence of this maturation.
In fact, the pursuit of evidence forms the core of the film’s narrative. In 1980, Lee Strobel (Mike Vogel) finds his marriage and professional life turned upside-down when his wife Leslie (Erika Christiansen) converts from their shared atheism to Christianity. Convinced that his wife has been brainwashed by a cult — being just a couple of years removed from the Jonestown massacre — Strobel decides to apply his journalistic expertise to debunk the central core of the Christian faith: the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Can Strobel find an evidence-based argument to refute Christianity, or will he be forced to face his own biases and assumptions?
The Case for Christ models a familiar tension for believers between faith and reason. People come to Christianity through both paths and generally find ways to accommodate both. Leslie’s conversion comes through an emotional tie to faith, but Lee clings to his vision of reason. That dichotomy plays out in their interactions, depicted realistically and very believably between Vogel and Christiansen on screen. For most of us, who struggle to blend the two, we will recognize ourselves in Lee and Leslie.
Bari Weiss offers an insightful interview with Jonathan Haidt of New York University. I read the interview in the Wall Street Journal and wish I could post the whole thing but since it is probably behind a paywall, I would suggest reading excerpts provided by Rod Dreher in a recent blog post.
In addition to Dreher's excellent excerpts I'll add a couple of my own.
“Now there are no more conservative voices on the faculty or administration,” he [Haidt] says, exaggerating only a little. Heterodox Academy cites research showing that the ratio of left to right professors in 1995 was 2 to 1. Now it is 5 to 1.
The left, meanwhile, has undergone an ideological transformation. A generation ago, social justice was understood as equality of treatment and opportunity. . . Today justice means equal outcomes. “There are two ideas now in the academic left that weren’t there 10 years ago,” he says. “One is that everyone is racist because of unconscious bias, and the other is that everything is racist because of systemic racism.” That makes justice impossible to achieve: “When you cross that line into insisting if there’s not equal outcomes then some people and some institutions and some systems are racist, sexist, then you’re setting yourself up for eternal conflict and injustice.”