Lady Bird

The last time the Arts & Faith community released a Top 100 Spiritually Significant films list, I campaigned hard for Lady Bird’s inclusion. It finished in the bottom ten. This time I shared an essay of mine on the spirituality of Gerwig’s filmography and repeatedly Read More …

Pinocchio (1940)

Walt Disney’s Pinocchio is one of the great moral fables that American cinema has gifted the world. I understand that Disney based his studio’s second animated feature on an Italian literary classic—Carlo Collodi’s 1883 children’s novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio—but, truth be told, that book Read More …

Ben-Hur (1959)

Ben-Hur is a glorious example of epic Hollywood filmmaking—big, bombastic, sometimes creaky and often inspiring. It combines the usual ahistorical Hollywood hokum (“Roman salutes,” slave galleys, stately white marble) with an epic story that’s more Alexandre Dumas than the Gospel of Luke. A young man, Read More …

The Lord of the Rings

Christians are fond of rehearsing the story, told in Humphrey Carpenter’s The Inklings, of J.R.R. Tolkien nudging C.S. Lewis past the conversion tipping point with a well-timed comment about mythopoeia. When Lewis objected that other cultures and religions shared many mythic elements with Christianity, Tolkien Read More …