The Physician: Medical Science and God

In the 11^th century, Christians were not welcome in Persia, so in the film, The Physician (2013), Rob Cole, a Christian, pretends to be Jewish in order to travel from Western Europe to study at the medical school of Ibn Sina, a famous physician in Isfahan. He eventually reveals his religion as that of “the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” when he is on trial before the local imam. The Jews there doubtlessly feel used and betrayed. As interesting as interreligious controversy can be, I contend that the nature of Cole’s crime is more significant from the standpoint of religion itself. In short, the film illustrates what bad effects are likely to come from committing a category mistake with respect to religion and another domain. Whether conflating distinct domains or erasing the boundary between them, category mistakes had diminished the credibility of religion as being over-reaching by the time that the film was made. As for the matter of interreligious differences, the sheer pettiness by which the three Abrahamic religions that share the same deity have made mole hills into untraversable mountains is hardly worthy of attention, whereas that which makes religion as a domain of phenomena unique and thus distinct from other, even related domains, is in need of further work. The film could have done more in this regard.

The full essay is at "The Physician." 

Hope Gap: A Critique of Institutional Religion

Organized or institutional religion as the Roman Catholic Church is in the background in the 2019 European film, Hope Gap. Even with such names as Grace and Angela, religious connotations are present. In fact, the film can be interpreted, at least in part, as a critique on religion in general and Catholicism in particular. The medium of film can indeed play a vital role in critiquing sacred cows from the vantagepoint of an oblique angle or a safe distance.

The full essay is at "Hope Gap."

The Master: A Religious Cult

In The Master (2012), Lancaster Dodd tells Freddie Quell, the man whom Lancaster wants to cure of alcoholism and mental illness, “I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher, but above all I am a man.” Given Lancaster’s presumption of infallibility concerning knowing that every human soul has been reincarnated even for trillions of years, the end of the line would more fittingly be, “I am a man above all (others).” With regard to being a physician, Lancaster comes up short because he underestimates the medical severity of Freddie’s alcoholism and his likely psychotic mental illness. Upon being released from jail, Lancaster should realize that Freddie’s rage and temper-tantrum in his jail cell evince mental illness of such severity that it is lunacy to suppose that the patient can be cured by walking back and forth in a room between a wall and a window and being sure to touch both, and by saying “Doris” over and over again in a dyad with Lancaster’s new son-in-law. In fact, Lancaster actually encourages Freddie’s alcoholism by asking that Freddie continue to make his “potion,” which contains paint-thinner filtered through bread. It is not Lancaster, but his wife, Peggy, who puts a stop to the “booze.” From her sanity, both that of Freddie and Lancaster can be questioned. That Lancaster is the Master of a religious cult, or “movement,” renders his mental state particularly problematic.

The full essay is at "The Master."

Pope Leo on the Cinema: A Distinctively Religious Role?

As “part of the Vatican’s efforts to reach out beyond the Catholic Church to engage with the secular world,” Pope Leo spoke with actors and directors on November 15, 2025 about the ability of film “to inspire and unite.”[1] He spoke to the filmmakers about film itself as an art, and what it can do socially. What it can do in a distinctively religious sense was oddly left out. I submit that leaving out how film can contribute to spirituality wherein a transcendent is explicitly included, while instead discussing the social functions of film not only limits the potential of film, but also ironically marginalizes a significant potential of film ironically in the pope’s own field.

Speaking generically about the medium of film, Pope Leo stated that it “articulates the questions that dwell within us, and sometimes, even provokes tears that we didn’t know we needed to shed.”[2] There is nothing distinctively religious or spiritual about these features of movies. Two of the pope’s favorite movies, “Ordinary People” (1980), which was filmed in the pope’s hometown, Chicago, and “Life is Beautiful” (1997) are known for their psychological aspects: a family dealing with one son’s suicide and another family dealing with the Nazis in Europe. In fact, neither film includes anything religious or spiritual. Admittedly, since the works of Sigmund Freud were published, it has been tempting in Western culture to reduce religion to psychology, or to conflate the two distinct domains if they were the same. The increasing secularizing of North America and Europe in the twentieth century no doubt played a role in reconfiguring religion as it were isomorphic with another domain. Had the faculty and librarians at Harvard, including Larry Summers and Ben Friedman (both economists), not been so rude and even brazenly passive aggressive toward me while I was conducting research there on the category mistake by pulling the weeds out of the religious garden to find what lies underneath as the native fauna distinct to religion, I might have written a treatise on religion sui generis. At a certain age, however, a person can simply ask oneself, do I really want to contribute to the American academic academy? But I digress.

In his talk, the pope went so far as to make a political or cultural statement regarding the ability of film to not merely console, but also challenge people by including marginal voices. In its “noblest sense,” he said, the “popular art” of motion pictures is “intended for and accessible to all.”[3] Rather than urging theater-owners to charge poor people less, the pope was advocating that different points of view, presumably on social, economic, and even political matters, be included in screenplays. To be sure, such a function of film—to widen popular debates to include more perspectives—would be of great value to a society, given the phenomenon of “group-think,” which George Orwell discusses in his book, “1984,” and the self-interested strategies of business and political elites to artificially narrow what is debated to keep truly challenging perspectives from being aired.

Nevertheless, a religious leader overreaches in putting such an emphasis on secular, ideological concerns, including “affirming the social and cultural value” of people watching movies together in a movie theater without mentioning that high ticket prices keep out the poor and so they should instead be watching movies alone, assuming they have laptops and wifi. That the advent of computer technology has made an expensive ticket at a movie theater optional suggests that the pope’s nostalgia in addressing filmmakers in 2025 was partial, as is the case with any ideology. That he inadvertently put unneeded pressure on poor and even lower middle-class people to pay steep ticket-prices so they can be included in “uniting” with other people merely in being in a dark room together reacting similarly to scenes in a movie, supports my point that he should have stayed with his knitting, which is a saying in the book, In Search of Excellence by Peters and Waterman, whose main point is that companies should stick to what they are good at, rather than wander off in a Zhuangzian fashion into other lines of business to get more in profits as a Mohist would.  

The pope’s focus on matters that were not directly in his forte not only rendered him subject to correction, but also came with an opportunity cost in terms of the foregone benefit that a talk on the potential of film in theology or spirituality would have had instead. Even in saying that “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) and “The Sound of Music” (1964) were two of his other favorite films, the pope did not mention films among his favorites that are centered on religion, and even more surprisingly absent, on the Gospels in particular, such as “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (1965), “The Passion of the Christ” (2004), “Jesus” (1999), “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988), “King of Kings” (1961), and even “The Nativity Story” (2006), "Mary" (2024), and “Ben-Hur” (1959). “Jesus of Nazareth” (1977), albeit a television mini-series though with an astounding cast, was undoubtedly formative for the pope, as he was a college student when the show first aired. I remember well watching that limited series as a boy. As a college student then, the pope would not have missed such a series.  I remember what the very religious college students in the years soon after the pope had graduated; they were very focused on their religious faith. One Baptist student curiously in ROTC used to come (uninvited) sometimes into my dorm room while I was studying at night to pray for me because my roommate was an evangelical Christian. This was nothing compared to the Calvinist cult I would encounter at Yale’s divinity school and then the “woke” cult at Harvard’s divinity school. But I digress (again).

I contend that Pope Leo missed an opportunity in 2025 to address filmmakers about how film can address theology, as well as related though distinct things like metaphysics, the supernatural, science, and morality. For example, theology in terms of two different interpretations of the Kingdom of God is salient in the film, “Mary Magdalene” (2018), especially when Mary and Peter debate two very different yet valid interpretations of what the Kingdom of God is. The question of the woman’s place among the disciples is an element of the film, but as Mary and Jesus are not romantically or sexually but only spiritually close, the feminist angle between Mary and the rest of the disciples is kept secondary. For the pope to have highlighted that angle, his take on contemporary culture could have eclipsed distinctly theological questions regarding the Kingdom of God. Even the Catholic Church’s stance against women becoming priests is not theological, and the closeness of Mary to Jesus in the film, plus The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, can inform that Church’s stance on that issue. But I digress (again).

Besides theology in and through film, how a character’s experience of distinctly religious (or spiritual) transcendence can be acted and depicted in a film visually would have been an excellent topic for the pope’s talk. That films have effectively portrayed two different realms, even simultaneously as in the film, “The Others" (2001), in a secular, otherworldly context, means that the medium of film could do a lot more when it comes to visually and verbally hinting at a distinctively religious or spiritual transcendent, which can be grasped (to a point) as something that is inherently beyond the limits of human cognition, perspective, and emotion.[4] Ironically, religious leaders may be most useful in speaking to a secular audience by highlighting how the domain of religion is distinct, rather than in trying to be influential in secular, ideological terms. Pope Leo should have stuck to his knitting, for the potential of the art and medium of film in depicting spiritual and institutionally-religious matters is great, and on this point I most certainly do not digress.

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1. Nicole Winfield, “Pope Leo XIV Celebrates Cinema with Hollywood Stars and Urges Inclusion of Marginal Voices,” APNews.com, November 15, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. I am drawing here on the work of Pseudo-Dionysus, a late 6^th century Christian theologian who stressed the ineffability of God.

My Name is Bernadette

The film, My Name is Bernadette (2011), focuses, almost as an obsession, on the question of whether the girl “actually” saw the Virgin Mary in a series of visions at Lourdes. All too often, miracles are treated as ends in themselves, rather than as pointers to something deeper. Even the girl in the visual and auditory (albeit only to Bernadette) apparition identified itself only in terms of a supernatural miracle, the Virgin Mary’s Immaculate Conception. I contend that Bernadette’s awe-inspiring spirituality visually conveyed on screen, and Monsignor Forcade’s spiritually-insightful advice to Bernadette as to her functions in her upcoming life as a nun is more important than the miracles, even from the standpoint of religion. In other words, the story-world of the film, which is based on the true story of Bernadette at Lourdes, is a good illustration of a what happens when everyone in a large group of people reduces religion to science and even metaphysics and misses the sui generis (i.e., unique) and core elements of religion. Such is the power of group-think that conflation of different, albeit related, domains of human experience can remain hidden in a societal blind-spot. Not even the film makes this blind-spot transparent.

The full essay is at "My Name Is Bernadette."

The Omen

Released in 1976, The Omen reflects the pessimism in America in the wake of the OPEC gas shortage and President Nixon’s Watergate cover-up, both of which having occurred within easy memory of the two notable assassinations in 1968. Additionally, the drug culture had come out in the open in the anti-Vietnam War hippie sub-culture, and the sexual revolution, which arguably set the stage for the spread of AIDS beginning in the next decade, was well underway, both of which undoubtedly gave evangelical, socially-conservative Christians the sense that it would not be long until everything literally goes to hell. The film provides prophesy-fulfillment of a birth-narrative (i.e., myth) and a supernatural personality known biblically as the anti-Christ, who as an adult will set man against man until our species is zerstört. It is as if matter (the Christ) and anti-matter (the anti-Christ) finally cancel each other out at the end of time. Economically during the 1970s, inflation and unemployment were giving at least some consumers and laborers the sense of being in a jet trapped in a vertical, free-fall dive of stagflation that not even fiscal and/or monetary policy could divert. The pessimistic mood was captured in another way in another film, Earthquake (1974), in which a natural disaster plays off the mood of utter futility throughout the decade. It is no wonder that Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” resonated so much as a presidential-campaign slogan in 1979 as Jimmy Carter was mired in micro-management inside the White House.  The optimism of a resurgence in political energy overcame the decade’s sense of pessimism. That Damien, the anti-Christ in The Omen, survives the attempt on his life by Robert Thorn, his adoptive father resonates with that pessimism. Satan’s plan is still “game on” as the film ends, and this ending fits the mood in America during the decade. With this historical context contemporaneous with the film laid out, a very practical, manifestation of evil subtly depicted in the film and yet easily recognized by customers frustrated with corrupt and inept management of incompetent employees will be described in the context of pessimism from utter frustration. Such frustration survived the squalid decade of the 1970s at least decades into the next century.

The full essay is at "The Omen."

The Seventh Sign

Carl Schultz’s film, The Seventh Sign (1988), centers on the theological motif of the Second Coming, the end of the world when God’s divine Son, Jesus, returns to judge the living and even the dead. In the movie, Jesus returns as the wrath of the Father, which has already judged humanity as having been too sinful to escape God’s wrath. David Bannon, who is the returned Jesus in the film, is there to break the seven seals of the signs leading up to the end of the world, and to witness the end of humanity. Abby Quinn, the pregnant wife of Russell Quinn, asks David (an interesting name-choice, given that Jesus is of the House of David in the Gospel narratives) whether the chain (of signs) can be broken. How this question plays out in the film’s denouement is interesting from a theological standpoint. Less explicit, but no less theologically interesting, is what role humans can and should have in implementing God’s law. The film both heroizes and castigates our species.

The full essay is at "The Seventh Sign."