Dead Man Walking

Few political issues reveal the divisions among people who claim to be religious or spiritual more than does the death penalty.  Like Dead Man Walking, the other great death penalty film on this list, At the Death House Door, argues passionately that the death penalty traumatizes those who are called to enact it. Like soldiers drafted into…

“I feel like it should mean nothing or everything,” Travis says of the Christianity that he sees professed by others and lived by Martin, “and I can’t get to either place.”  This is Martin Bonner is the rare recent film where Christian characters talk like Christians I know. Martin has been hurt by the church….

A romantic triangle is one of the most common storylines in film. The characters are usually pretty well defined: a well meaning guy with a raging libido, a gorgeous woman with loose morals, and a sweet sensible girl pining for a husband. And of course, there is sex. But what if a film replaces this…

The Mission confronts us with deeply spiritual questions: ·         What are we to make of the fact that the European missionaries often served as the vanguard of colonialism yet also became the staunchest defenders of the colonized against colonial plunder and oppression? ·         To what extent will or should conversion to Christianity change a person, or a whole…

A useful starting point when approaching Friedrich Wilhelm (F. W.) Murnau’s Faust is Rembrandt’s 1652 etching of the same name. In it, we see Faust alone in his library, poring through parchments, surrounded on all sides by scientific paraphernalia. But Rembrandt pays little attention to the things in the room and, instead, directs our focus toward Faust’s desperate…