3 result(s) tagged “Spirituality”

The first images of Jim Kurring involve his morning routine, and it’s nothing remarkable: He eats, he showers, he reads the paper, he exercises.

But there are little hints about how we’re supposed to react to him. He laughs out loud — and not very convincingly — at something on the Today show. When he’s lifting weights, we see one of those inspirational posters encouraging “determination.” And he prays, on his knees at the foot of his bed, with a cross looking down upon him. When he finishes, he gets up and claps his hands together once, as if Team God had just broken from the huddle. We learn through voice-over that he participates in some dating service, or at the least runs a personal ad. He’s a cop, and he gives himself a pep talk in the squad car.

At Strange Culture, RC is hosting the Film + Faith Blog-a-thon, running through November 9. (The announcement is here.)

I’m hoping for a diverse, engaging, thoughtful, and provocative batch of essays, because the spiritual component of movies is critical but often neglected. People gravitate toward films that make them feel good — an effect on the soul — even if they typically don’t examine the reasons. Sometimes we must decide how movies fit into our spiritual/moral world view, a topic that Will Gray explores in his lovely contribution.

I’ve resurrected (boooooooo!) old essays on morality and movies and the Exorcist prequels as offerings, and I plan to write at least one other thing. (This essay on Requiem probably fits, too. Hell, so does this thing I posted yesterday.) I wish the blog-a-thon were longer, because I have several other things I’d like to write about.

Near the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, spiritual-documentary filmmaker Martin Doblmeier conducted a survey on his Web site. He asked whether people supported constructing a “garden of forgiveness” at Ground Zero in New York City.

Thousands of votes later, the results were overwhelming: Roughly 95 percent of respondents said “no.”

Although he wrote and directed The Power of Forgiveness, Doblmeier offered this anecdote in a recent phone interview without judgment. His point was that forgiveness is something that spiritual people tend to embrace as an abstract concept, but putting it into practice is shockingly difficult. For many, he said, forgiveness is the equivalent of a spare tire, something you “keep ... in the back of the trunk and hope to God you never need it.”