Christ calls his followers not only from something but also to something: both abundant life (John 10:10) and self-denial in taking up the cross (Matthew 16:24). Christian faith offers us the paradox of saving our lives by losing our lives for Christ’s sake (Matthew 16:25)—a Read More …
This annual Arts & Faith project enters its second decade this year, making it an apt time to summarize its purpose and methodology. The jury attempts to identify ten films released or distributed in the previous year that it recommends to Christian audiences. The reasons Read More …
It can be difficult to pin down what exactly makes Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro (Tonari no Totoro) such a towering achievement of cinema, its simplicity and gentleness belying its power to attune us to the act of living. On the surface, it is a Read More …
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 …
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 …
“You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” Laurence Fishbourne’s Morpheus poses these iconic options Read More …
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 …
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 …
The Sixth Sense was not M. Night Shyamalan’s debut feature film, but it might as well have been for all the immediate attention and status it earned him from moviegoing audiences. His first two films – Praying with Anger and Wide Awake – each dealt, Read More …
Here you are in prison. They say you may die here. You call your friends to your side. — My friends, I want you to ask him this :Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?But John, you once Read More …