Showing results by author "Chris Mckinney" in All Categories

Imagine a neighborhood where people are connected rather than isolated, where wrongs are righted, where mercy brings fences down, and where we become agents in seeing God’s kingdom come. Believing the beatitudes are Jesus’ invitation into neighborhood flourishing, Neighborhoods Reimagined envisions how these upside-down values can turn our corners right-side-up.

Year 2142: Earth is 30 years past a near-collision with the asteroid Sessho-seki. Akira Kimura, the scientist responsible for eliminating the threat, has reached heights of celebrity approaching deification. But now, Akira feels her safety is under threat, so after years without contact, she reaches out to her former head of security, who has since become a police detective.

Ken Hideyoshi is the new guy in Halawa Correctional Institute. He’s tough looking, a hard case. His cellmate is Cal—the mute tattoo artist of the prison who murdered his own wife. Ken, already inked with a gang symbol and a Japanese emblem, eventually asks Cal to create an elaborate tattoo on his back, in kanji script, of Musashi’s Book of the Void.

From the time he became one of the first African American football players at Robert E. Lee High School in Montgomery, Alabama, Ralph Stokes recognized a calling on his life for the cause of racial integration. This calling followed him everywhere he went. After becoming one of the first five Black football players at the University of Alabama and making many advances there, Ralph was a pioneer for integration in the business arena and later in the world of golf.

Secretly, a man welds steel to a bulldozer. Later, another watches a ghost walk along his dry-walled hallways. A woman raises her teenage son in a homeless encampment where the boy has to fight to survive with the help of a strange, lonely cop. In Mililani Mauka, the lives of two families, the Motts and the Krills, come together as they try to keep afloat in a changing Honolulu, a city with growing suburbs and homeless camps.

Bruce Blanc, fresh off a nine-year prison jolt and back on the streets of Honolulu, is about to turn 41. He finds himself embroiled in urban Honolulu’s Asian American nightlife. Kids lighting up the night with cocaine and killing daylight with Xanax. Girls who spend more time looking at themselves in the mirror than Snow White’s stepmom; the older divorcees with means who prey on them. And 90-pound female drug lords and the cops in love with them. A new bar is opening or shutting down daily.

Raised by their mother, a bar owner in Bolohead Row, Honolulu's red-light district, they each face issues of varying addictions. Charlie, the newly divorced stepson, works a dead-end job in an ABC store and spends nights at his mother's bar singing karaoke. Mark is a shut-in who occupies all of his waking hours playing a computer game called Everquest. Within 24 hours of being out of prison, Winnie, the eldest, has a boyfriend, money, and enough drugs to send her back for life. Dangerous people are searching for her, and Charlie is unwittingly swept into her turmoil.

Join your co-hosts, Chris Lacks, Tyler Cavin, and Mike McKinney, as they deep-dive into the darkest crypts of our favorite film genre. Three films enter, and one film wins.

In 1997, social services rescues Boi (four), Shane (five), and Glory (six), three abused and neglected siblings from a junked city bus where they have been living with their frail dying grandmother and addict mother.

Year 2150: Eight years after the murder of Akira Kimura, Water City’s renowned scientist and anointed “God,” the nameless antihero who tracked down Akira’s killer, is no longer a detective, but a stay-at-home dad. While his wife climbs the corporate ladder of the city’s police department, he raises his daughter and occasionally takes the odd job as a bounty hunter. His domestic bliss is threatened when Ascalon’s Scar—the mark left by Akira’s destruction of Sessho-seki—vanishes from the sky and a familiar face thought dead returns from the ocean depths to exact revenge on humanity.

We want to love our neighbors, but we’re busy and sometimes don’t know where to start. In each episode, we’ll keep neighboring on your mind by encouraging you with simple ways to connect with those next door. Because your address is not an accident, and neither is your neighbor’s.