(Caution: Spoilers ahead.) Eilis found new life in America. It wasn’t easy for the Irish lass, played by Saoirse Ronan in the excellent film Brooklyn. She comes to New York alone, not knowing a soul in this strange, new world. Thanks in large part to the Catholic Church, she has a job and a place to stay. Thanks to her sister, she has a suitcase full of sensible clothes. But you need more than that to make a life. But... Read more
Mother Teresa isn’t a saint. Not yet officially, at any rate. But for many of us, she might as well be. The tiny nun (she was just five feet tall) did some larger-than-life work in the slums of Calcutta, India, serving some of the world’s poorest people through six decades—almost right up until her death in 1997. But even though I, like most people, knew of Mother Teresa, I didn’t really know that much about her—who she was, how her... Read more
Music is inherently spiritual, I believe. It comes from the heart, from the soul, speaking to our deepest pain and our greatest joy. It is an expression not only of our humanity, but our divine roots—our meager creations paying homage to our Creator, expressions of our yearning for the transcendent. No wonder the Taliban hated music so. Music, as raw and as wonderful as it is, circumvents their meager conceptions of God and somehow taps into a greater, unspoken understanding.... Read more
As we go into this holiday weekend, we all can take the opportunity to consider what we’re thankful for. And I, for one, am thankful for this new trailer for Captain America: Civil War. Sort of. This makes for a pretty provocative 156 seconds—and frankly, kind of hard to watch. Tony Stark and Steve Rogers … enemies? “Sorry Tony,” Cap says in the trailer. “You know I wouldn’t do this if I had any other choice. But,” he adds, referring... Read more
Thanksgiving is, in some ways, America’s most devout holiday. There are no bunnies or men in bright red suits to distract us, no stockings or baskets filled with candy. It’s not necessarily a sacred day: You don’t need religion, after all, to be thankful. But there’s still something deeply, perhaps inescapably spiritual about it. For when we offer our thanks for our many, many blessings, we’re almost forced to asked what, exactly, has blessed us. Who, exactly, are we thanking.... Read more
G.K. Chesterton once wrote that “Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.” And indeed, it seems like the religion specializes in dichotomy. Christians are guided by rules but covered by grace. We hold monks who don’t talk to anyone and missionaries who talk with everyone in equally high regard. We’re simultaneously sin-twisted creatures and God’s greatest creation. Yeah, Christianity is pretty strange. Take the whole dichotomy between justice and... Read more
I just watched a movie called The Letters, a biopic on the ministry of Mother Teresa’s work in Calcutta. I’ll write a bit more about the film when it officially releases this December, but I thought one scene was worth talking about today. Late in the film, we see Mother Teresa (Juliet Stevenson) accept the Nobel Peace Prize (which she won in 1979). During her acceptance speech, she quoted a prayer attributed to St. Francis, a friar and preacher who... Read more
Theaters are full of secular movies where God’s name is mainly used as a curse. A few make room for some Christian movies, too—cinematic sermons made specifically to bolster belief (sometimes at the expense of the actual movie). There’s not a lot of room left, it seems, for movies that show the sort of faith that looks familiar to most of us—a faith that’s not particularly showy or splashy or supernatural, but one that nevertheless is with us every day,... Read more
Disney movies are rarely explicitly spiritual. Though Disney was a practicing Protestant and spoke often about his own personal faith, he mostly kept religion out of his work—with one huge exception. Fantasia, which officially turned 75 today, includes one of the most overtly religious expressions in all of the Disney canon—the still shocking, still moving “Night on Bald Mountain/Ave Maria” sequence that puts an exclamation point on the film. Looking back, it’s a little crazy how un-Disney the segment feels.... Read more
“Everything in your life is public. There are no secrets. Everything you say, everything you do, everyplace (sic) you go, every thought you think is going to be known by all.” Ted Haggard—one-time pastor of Colorado Springs’ massive New Life Church, one-time president of the National Association of Evangelicals—wrote that in his book Letters from Home. Those words proved sadly prophetic: In 2006, a male prostitute came forward, alleging that he and Haggard had had sex and used methamphetamines. Haggard—one... Read more
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