Civic spaces of substance are essential in today’s world, and Public Square Magazine has been blessed with 232 authors who have penned 991 articles for tens of thousands of readers that have created such a space of civil and faithful discourse. One we can all be proud of. In an effort to expand the community further, Public Square Magazine is pleased to announce the launch of Public Square Media, a new platform designed to foster greater engagement and connection.
As the first phase of this new venture, Public Square Media has gathered a group of mission-aligned podcasts that we will be supporting and will be supporting each other. In recent years, podcasts have become a ubiquitous form of media consumption, with an estimated 62 million Americans, or 22% of the population, downloading and listening to an average of seven episodes per week. As an immersive auditory experience, podcasts provide a unique form of entertainment and information consumption that allows listeners to hear the tone, inflection, and emotion in a speaker’s voice. This can make valuable content more engaging and relatable, fostering a more profound sense of connection and community among many listeners.
At Public Square Magazine, we are committed to effective communication, and we believe podcasts are a valuable tool for promoting civil dialogue and understanding. By engaging audiences who prefer to process and retain information presented in a verbal format, we can expand our community and ensure that our message reaches a broader audience. Our commitment to quality writing will continue as we enlarge the circle to include those who appreciate auditory methods.
The podcasts participating in this new initiative, Public Square Media, cover a range of topics and feature experts in a variety of genres. These podcasts are informative, accurate, reliable, and entertaining. We hope that you will give them a listen and let us know what you think. If you know of other shows you would like to have considered, please reach out to us at [email protected].
At Public Square Magazine, we are committed to fostering civil dialogue and understanding, and we believe that Public Square Media will be a valuable addition to our community, offering a new platform for engagement, connection, and growth. We look forward to embarking on this new journey with you, our valued readers and listeners.
Public Square Media launches with a focus this month on motherhood. We invite you to check out each of our podcasts and their featured episodes:
Family Bro Evening
Family Bro Evening is a podcast focusing on breaking barriers to understanding LDS beliefs and culture. We tackle the hard questions, dive into the doctrine, discuss culture quirks, and always have a bit of fun! New episodes are released every two weeks!
Our topic on motherhood/womanhood encompasses a two-part episode, with the specific women’s issues coming in part 2, including both links for context.
Pop Culture on the Apricot Tree is a podcast dedicated to discussing pop culture from an LDS perspective. We talk about gospel insights through great stories and help you find entertainment that is both true and beautiful. The podcast is co-hosted by Liz Busby and Carl Cranney and features rotating guests discussing popular media from a Latter-Day Saint perspective.
In this episode, they discuss the protagonist Louise’s courage to become a mother in spite of knowing the pain it will inevitably cause her and compare her with Mother Eve. They will also have a “Mothers in the Media” episode that will be out on Thursday, May 11.
Radical Civility is where we have hard conversations well. In the words of Arthur Brooks, the goal isn’t to disagree less but to disagree better. Our goal is to tell the truth with a fair dose of kindness and generosity—or, as President Russel M. Nelson has recently encouraged everyone, our goal is to really try to engage in peacemaking. Radical Civility will be recording upcoming episodes featuring some of the women in the Public Square community, but invite you to become familiar with them with this featured episode:
Raising Family hosts David Steele, Linda Hill, and Brent Andrewsen tackle the most pressing issues facing today’s families, from social and cultural questions to theology surrounding The Family: A Proclamation to the World. You can find all episodes hosted at thefamilyproclamation.org or anywhere you like listening to your podcasts.
At Sit Down with Sky and Amanda, we are navigating a divisive world in a mixed-orientation marriage. We approach LGBT+ issues in a gospel-centered way and are always faith-affirming first. Join us in pursuing the balance of grace and truth with all the relevant cultural issues we face every day.
Increasingly, we are hearing that honoring preferred pronouns is simply a way to show love and nothing more. Yet this overlooks both the larger ideology connected to this pronoun embrace and its real-life implications, especially in the lives of young people.
My son asked me what “Love Hurts” was about. I told him it was about how we can’t just move on from our past. “Oh,” he looked concerned, “That’s a bad movie.” Unlike my son concluded, “Love Hurts” isn’t a bad movie, but it’s not a Christian one. The theme repeated over and over is that we cannot move on from the past until we conquer it. Our main character desperately works for redemption, but the film keeps telling him he can’t have it. His aw-shucks charm in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” combined with the nostalgia for his 80s career has combined to make Ke Huy Quan Hollywood’s “it” man of the moment. And “Love Hurts” is the star vehicle to determine if he can top the marquee of a nationwide opening. It’s a bit of a mixed bag. The film is set over a Valentine’s Day weekend. Quan, plays Marvin Gable the regional realtor of the year. His upbeat attitude endears him to his clients and coworkers alike. Marvin used to be the enforcer for the local mob run by his brother. His brother ordered him to take out Rose, his unrequited crush, for stealing. But Marvin let her live and started a new life. Rose has decided to come back, delivering Valentine’s to the major players, dragging Marvin back into the life he tried to leave behind. The film, which runs a brisk 85 minutes, is mostly a series of choreographed fight scenes interspersed with just enough exposition to explain the plot and three love stories. So it’s worth mentioning that the fight choreography is very focused on creating tableaus showing off the imagination of the designer. And this does work to create some eye-popping visuals. But I’m not sure if the trade-off to get those moments was worth it. To get to the visual moments it wants to show off the fights vacillate wildly between grounded brutal realism and physics so implausible it would make the Avengers blush, with no real explanation or meaning between the two. The pacing of the fights was often awkward and halting. And I never felt any stakes in the scenes because I never knew how much risk my protagonists were in. The film uses a series of intermittent voice-overs from both Marvin and Rose to explain their attraction to one another. But the chemistry between the two never takes off. And while the film explains why Rose would be attracted to Marvin’s kindness and power, we never figure out why Marvin was willing to throw his entire life away twice at an outside chance with a woman who isn’t that interested in him. The two grunts in the film played by André Eriksen and Marshawn Lynch, spend the time between their fights figuring out how to write a text to repair one of their marriages. The most amusing romance is between Raven, who breaks into Marvin’s office to fight him, and Ashley, the real estate assistant who finds his unconscious body and falls in love with him while reading his poetry in his notebook before he wakes up. The movie is surprisingly funny. It leans into the cliches of the Asian mob film, and then juxtaposes it next to a bunch of odd things: suburban model homes, an all-American black belt, a poet, a pull-over sweater. It’s mostly just the one joke, but it’s enough for the film’s brisk run. My favorite part of the film was Sean Astin. Astin plays Marvin’s boss, and older brother figure who gave him the job when he escaped the mob. Astin and Quan famously shared the screen in “Goonies.” During the scene early in the film when Astin gives Quan the real estate award, you could feel the dialogue transcend the characters. It felt like Astin was so proud of the success of his old friend Quan, and this was his moment to tell him. Quan, for his part, does everything right but doesn’t take the material to another level. If you love fight choreography, there will certainly be some interesting things to look at here. And if you want a classic action romp with a few laughs and a Valentine’s twist this might be the film for you. But for most people, I don’t think it all comes together. It’s too gory without meaning. And while the movie seems to think it has a happy ending, I can’t imagine that most of the people watching will agree. It’s got R-rated content with no compensating uplift to make it worth the experience. Two out of five stars. “Love Hurts” opens nationwide on February 7, 2025.
As we think of Jesus during the holidays, let us consider His filial relationship with the Father and what it means to be a family ruled by love and unity.
A contemporary set movie, “Valiant One” follows a US military unit in South Korea when they are blown off course and crash across the border in North Korea with a civilian tech specialist aboard. The film is putatively about the growth of Brock, who is thrust into commanding the unit after the crash. As the opening title cards tell us, “Heroes’ Aren’t Born. They Are Made.” And the We see him as he changes from struggling with his major decisions to beginning to make one. In one well-structured scene, the farmer catches them hiding in the barn. After a standoff, Brock approaches the farmer and de-escalates the situation. We see him and his soldiers as they recognize the humanity of their enemies, and make tough decisions. Ultimately, though, the areas he’s growing in don’t have a deep resonance because they aren’t Christ-like attributes. And the broader moral universe of the film is nihilist. It’s taut and well-structured and manages to tell a complete story in less than 80 minutes. It clearly is influenced by the years of experience director Steve Barnett has spent on the studio side of things. But it’s also clear that he lacks the artistic vision that elevates those essential storytelling blocks into an actual story. In some ways, the film reminds me of a paint-by-number before it’s been completed. Everything is in the right place, but it’s clearly not art or even particularly interesting to look at yet. The characters fall flat, particularly the two leads. Which keeps the story beats from ever coming together into a coherent whole. They have the kind of tragic backstories you’d expect, but they feel disconnected from the actions and motivations we actually see them enact. Eventually, even the plot feels like it’s doing circles, revisiting the same moral dilemmas and crises, without enough new character growth to warrant it. I can imagine there’s an audience for this movie. For those who love war movies, this one is clear and comprehensible. And if you are automatically invested in the uniforms, you have clear stakes that give the film energy and a through line that is enhanced by an aggressive hip-hop score. The film will probably most resonate with those with a similar backstory as Brock, who can see themselves as him. I imagine watching his growth would make this movie particularly meaningful to them. The film is R-rated. It is not particularly gory, but there is certainly war like violence, and we see many deaths, including executions. And the screenwriter went to lengths to capture the authentic pitter-patter of the way soldiers speak. But this means lots and lots of over-the-top pointless never-ending crassness and profanity. The larger moral of the film is pretty bland, and so by the end I felt degraded rather than lifted up. War movies can certainly uplift when they tell the right stories. This is not one of them. I wouldn’t watch it with my children, even when they were grown. If someone did, I would suggest asking them questions about the ethics of survival and the nature of leadership. One and a half out of five stars. Valiant One releases in the theaters January 31, 2025.
