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 …
“If you want to learn, then go and ask the wild animals and the birds, the flowers and the fish. Any of them can tell you what the Lord has done. Every living creature is in the hands of God.” – Job 12:7-10 Wolfwalkers is Read More …
The idea of general revelation seems forgotten in the modern theological discourse as we debate things like “Would Jesus allow trans kids to play games with their friends?” and “Is empathy a sin?” But the idea that all people understand on some level that there Read More …