In this brief essay, Bill McClay, current occupant of the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma, takes on just one of the many issues of the permanence and accessibility of information published on the internet today. He raises three concerns.

Christians go to the movies for a number of different reasons. Most, if not all, of us go, like everybody else, to be entertained. We want to escape the drudgery or the sameness (or both) of our lives into worlds we don’t normally inhabit, worlds of superheroes or space travel, of cowboys or battlefields, of pageantry or plainness, but worlds that are filled with characters and stories we don’t know or experience in our own daily lives. Sometimes we go to be surprised. We don’t know anything about a film, and a friend invites us, and we go. Sometimes we go, expecting to be challenged by the sadness of a story, or by its hilarity, or by its social or political message.

Parasite is the most surprising nominee of the nine contenders for Best Picture, and its win in this category was even more so. Like last year’s Roma, it is a foreign film, subtitled, set entirely and fully produced in a foreign country, in this case South Korea. Bong Joon Ho, its writer and director, is not new to Hollywood, though if you watched the Oscar presentations, where he won four awards, you might have thought so. IMdB has him listed as directing, and often writing, some twenty-five other films, most notably Snowpiercer, the cult-classic, futuristic thriller entirely set aboard a train. But Oscar night was his coming-out party, as he took away more statuettes (four) than anyone in the history of the awards, except Walt Disney.

A.O. Scott, the chief film critic for The New York Times, had a problem. He had written a negative review of the famous Avengers movie of several years ago, a movie which proceeded to make $1.5B at the box office worldwide. Shortly after the review came out, Samuel L. Jackson, one of the stars of the film tweeted, “AO Scott needs a new job! Let’s help him find one! One he can ACTUALLY do!”

Now, neither the box office bonanza—which Scott predicted by the way in his review—nor a tweet by Samuel L. Jackson, one of the most powerful actors in Hollywood, was going to threaten the job of arguably the most respected film critic in America.