Chris pratt

Many people reacted differently after the assassination of Charlie Kirk last week, but the actor Chris Pratt chose to behave in a way that few, if any, of his A-list Hollywood peers would have been comfortable with. The Guardians of the Galaxy star put a short video on X showing him praying, with his eyes tightly closed, and then he directed his fans – I almost wrote "followers", but he does have over eight million of them on the platform – to go out and do good works. With almost self-parodic seriousness, the erstwhile Star-Lord tells them to “go outside, get some sunshine, touch some grass... you’ve got time to reach out to someone in need and share this prayer with them”, before concluding, naturally enough “Amen”.

When I was a young attendee of a Charismatic Christian church, people were very keen to make themselves look ‘cool’. There was Christian rock. There was Christian rap. There was something called The Street Bible, which reframed Biblical stories through a modern lens. I don’t want to be too mean about this stuff. Some of the Christian rock was pretty good. The Street Bible had a sense of humor about itself. Even the rap wasn’t that bad. (I say that because I know what you are imagining. ‘My name is Ben and I’m here to say/Worship God and don’t be gay.’) Hillsong, at the time, was a very cool church. They had enormous services, and hit songs, and pastors who looked as if they had walked out of daytime television.

Donald Trump made a lot of promises during the 2016 campaign. Four years later, it has been mostly a relief to see them all broken. There's the ‘big, beautiful’ border wall, still largely a figment of the President's imagination (as was Mexico's interest in paying for it.) A plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, supposedly just around the corner for years, clearly does not exist. And despite much bloviating to the contrary, multiple Hillary Clinton sightings in the months and years following the election confirm that she is not, in fact, locked up. But perhaps most importantly, Trump made a lot of noise about extricating America from endless wars — instead, he's left us embedded in a brand new one. The Culture Wars are our new Forever War.