Free Republic

Scheduled for release in August, Bella bucks the desire to provide a neat and painfully obvious Christian message in favor of a realism and moral complexity that may affect the lives of women struggling with abortion. In Passion: Films, Faith, and Fury, a recent British documentary on the tumultuous relationship between religion and film, a Christian filmmaker was interviewed concerning his involvement in the 1979 epic film Jesus. Also known as The Jesus Project, the film has been translated into hundreds of languages and show at gigantic screenings across the globe. The filmmaker described the project as being inspired by...

Not eating meat on Fridays used to be synonymous with being Catholic. Restoring abstinence would not only revive tradition but signal solidarity with the poor.THE RENEWAL inaugurated by the Second Vatican Council sprang in large part from the liberating discovery of the depth and variety of Catholic tradition. Yet paradoxically the post-conciliar reforms were sometimes implemented in a spirit of philistine dismissal of “tradition” as nothing more than the dead hand of the past. In shedding a past perceived as sterile and oppressive, much that was profound and life-giving was also lost. One of the saddest casualties of that process...