Fourth Friday Film Forum: Silver Linings Playbook To be a person, my friend Andy Root says in his wonderful new book The Relational Pastor, is to be broken. Most of us probably don’t like the sound of that too much, but there is surprising power and freedom in admitting it’s true. For once we stop trying constantly to pretend that we have it all together, that life is just as we want it to be, and that we don’t really need anyone else, then we can open ourselves up to the power of authentic and transformative relationship. While I’ll review Andy’s book more thoroughly soon, I thought of it as I prepared to write about what was one...

This month’s Fourth Friday Film Forum: Gravity. From the very start of the film Gravity you are aware of two elements of space that we probably know but don’t often think about: 1) the sheer size of outer space and, by extension, the universe, and 2) the utter silence of space. Both of these elements are brought to vivid expression by filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón and serve to elicit one emotional reaction in particular: loneliness. That sense that you are so small as to be insignificant; so absolutely irrelevant in the larger scheme of things; so tiny and powerless in the face of the monumental challenges of life; so utterly...

I love movies. I love the way I get swept up into their grand stories and often – especially after a particularly good move – think a little differently because of them. And so I’ve decided to try to write once a month about one movie and what it suggests to me about our life of faith in the world. And, if I can remember to do it, I’ll try to post these reflections on the fourth Friday of the month. Why? No particular reason except that then I can call it the Fourth Friday Film Forum. (Corny, I know, but the preacher in me loves alliterations when I can find them. 🙂 ) So the film I want to talk about is Prometheus, released in the...

Best known, perhaps, as the cohost of PBS’s long-running Sneak Previews (later changed to Siskel and Ebert and the Movies), Roger Ebert was many things. The first Pulitzer Prize winning film critic, he was also a profound commentator on culture and politics, an incredibly astute observer of human nature and, ultimately, a candid memoirist and cataloguer of the human spirit. His very well written autobiography, Life Itself, began with this wonderful metaphor drawn from his lifelong love affair with film: I was born inside the movie of my life. The visuals were before me, the audio surrounded me, the plot unfolded inevitably but not...

Stories are powerful. The stories we tell each other, the stories we create to help us make sense of our lives, the stories we hear or read from others. Stories are powerful because, I believe, we are narrative beings – we make sense of and share our lives through the concrete plots and characters of stories. Even though the scenes of most stories we tell or hear are not exactly the same as events in our life, the are like elements of our life, and that similarity connects us not only to the story in question but to each other. Stories are powerful. Which is probably why film is such an incredible medium. It allows artists to take a story...