From among many others that might be highlighted, I have chosen six films released in the past 20 years that demand more than passive gazing from us as viewers and which promise to draw us into a wider space of realistic imagination. For Catholics, these are the kinds of films that beckon us toward a deeper engagement with the world as it is or as it might be. These are films that urge us to reckon with ourselves and the mystery of being human. These are also the kind of films that can forge bonds of communion between religious persons and nonreligious persons, who together may ponder and question the deeper significance of who we are, who we have been and who we might become.
Biographies of saints that get it right, Part 2 of 4
It is difficult to write about the saints. Their biographers face the twin dangers of reducing their subjects to a mere biography or of sapping their subjects in pious drivel. When biographers get it right, though, the saints come alive to inspire and challenge those who meet them in and through these biographies.
In this second installment in a series on saint biographies, we look to two modern works about two medieval reformers: “Catherine of Siena” by Sigrid Undset and “St. Philip Neri: I Prefer Heaven” by Giacomo Campiotti (director) and Mario Ruggeri (screenwriter).