July 2005

Last May, perhaps the most highly-anticipated new film of the new millennium opened to rave reviews and record-smashing box office receipts, eclipsing another, more modest film that had opened just a few days earlier. Both films were more than just entertaining summer spectacles, or "popcorn flicks,"

Different sectors of our culture, usually divided over matters political, are curiously united in their opposition to something called "materialism." The secular left decries business and commerce as "crass" and "alienating," bemoaning the relentless acquisition of gas-guzzling SUVs and cookie-cutter suburban homes. Not to be outdone,