Writing on the table
Come the Holidays, I feed a lot of people.
It’s not the flavor of odd holiday foods we crave, but the taste of home
Foods like fruitcakes, pig’s jowls, and lutefisk are all but unpalatable, but we keep making them, year after year.
Hallmark movies: An antidote for a male-centered world?
Romances validate what women bring to the table.
Dating ethnic foods for Christmas
Our family of six sisters had a tradition as we dated in high school and college. If you brought a boy home for Christmas Eve dinner, you had to force him to bring along a traditional dish representing his ethnic heritage. This was how we learned to embrace exotically diverse non-Scandinavians, not to mention expand […]
‘Heartland’ is family-friendly but not unbearably cheesy
For all its wholesomeness, “Heartland” is not sickly sweet and doesn’t sidestep the realities of life.
In ‘Severance,’ a bleak look at soul-stealing office culture
The Apple TV+ series “Severance” sends us back to work in prepandemic corporate America.
How Molly Burhans is helping the church fight climate change
A young cartographer is helping the church catalog its land holdings so it might address the environment, human migration, and sustainable land stewardship.
‘Ted Lasso’ shows a better way to be a man
Apple TV+’s ‘Ted Lasso’ is a skillfully crafted story about masculinity that is compassionate and supportive.
Tennant’s Fogg travels to find himself anew
‘Around the World in 80 Days’ offers an ode to taking chances.
In ‘The Hidden Life of Trees,’ forests are family, too
Trees are, as it turns out, social and more than a little like us.