Her father knows that she likes cooking gourmet food and has his sense of humor so suggests we watch The Bear (miniseries about a restaurant), but her mother is very religious and suggests we watch the Chosen.
Nope, I texted her back: that series was dumb.
Actually since I only watched the first film, I am probably wrong, but when actors think and act as if they were present day Americans, I can only shake my head in despair. For the past was another country, and the way people thought was different.
and most so called "religious" films are cliche ridden and boring.
Yet one does see main line movies that explore themes of religion, either openly or implicitly.
For example, the Lord of the Rings assumes a Christian world view: Fellowship, friendship, self sacrifice, despair, desire for power, and ironically more explicit in the film than the books, the power of prayer (Arwen's prayer heals Frodo and later saves Aragorn, and Galadriel appears to Frodo when he is in despair.
Riverdale is like the monasteries of the middle ages, holding the records of the past, but also centers of prayer that keep hope alive in a darkening world.
But there are some films with religious themes that do ask the questions that echo what we face in today's world.
The Mission is one. Maybe because I have worked in areas where one has to confront such things, the plot questions: What do you do when confronted with evil? Take up your sword and defend the weak, or oppose them with passive resistance and prayer?
And the film brings up other situations that make one think about choices:
Can the unforgivable sin be forgiven? Can you forgive your enemy who has enslaved your family?
Another character, this one from history not fiction, is Romero. His story is told in two films: One Salvador by Oliver Stone from a socialist viewpoint, and one told from the point of view of the Christians who confronted political evil: Romero.
Actually I can't watch the film, because of the segment where a priest is traveling with civilians and killed. Some of my friends were killed this way when I worked in Africa.
But there is a powerful scene about how does one confront evil?
Liberation theology was popular among some American missionaries in the 1980s: like the DeNiro character in the Mission, they said pick up your sword and fight. Most of them safely got thrown out of the country and left behind chaos...Ah, but how many considered that maybe the ordinary folk just wanted to live in peace.
In contrast to the glitzy ego gratifying activism of the SJWs, another alternative: You do your work to help, and you oppose it with your witness.
There is a scene in the middle of the film where soldiers have taken over a church, and desecrated it. They even threw the Blessed Sacrament (the sacramental bread) on the floor to be trampled on.
Archbishop Romero goes in and quietly asks them to leave and they laugh and throw him out. He then returns and starts to collect the sacrament, and again he is thrown out. He then leaves, and the local people watching quietly look at him in despair.
But then he returns, and he is wearing the signs of being a bishop. And he quietly marches to the church, and the locals follow him... and the soldiers leave and the church is cleansed.
And that is what it means to be a Christian: to wrestle with what God wants you to do.
There is no easy answer, and those who love easy answers are easily manipulated into letting evil win.
Those who objected to the VietNam war but didn't object to the atrocities when the communists won, or those who object to Israel's war in Gaza but don't want to face what would happen if you let these terrorists win (even though the 300 thousand dead in the Syrian civil war shows what happens when you let fanatics win).
Similarly, what do you do when, in the name of being a freedom fighter, thugs try to take over the country while the leaders get rich off of kidnapping, murder, and drugs? The story of Colombia trying to settle amnesties with FARC is instructive here. Or you can read the book on how Magsaysay overcame the Huk rebellion.
Letting the communists win results in massacres and concentration camps and ethnic cleansing at worst, or at best the murderous chaos as is now happening in Haiti? Do you support them in the name of human rights, as we saw too many missionaries in Central America do in the 1980s and tried to do here in the Philippines, ignoring what would happen if they won? Or do you support tough love, despite the violence and killing, so that you can make a society where ordinary people can be safe, as in El Salvador or as Duterte partly did here in the Philippines? Or do you cry human rights and let those who chose evil take over society, as the liberals naively are doing in Gaza, because they don't see the propaganda behind the war is about hating western civilization and destroying it?
Don't ask me: I am a physician not a revolutionary.
