worldview and perspective on Biopics

My Early Soundtrack What music shaped your early life? For most of us, our parents’ musical tastes probably were our starting place. That music made a deep impression on what we like — and don’t like...

While the second example is a bit dated (Titanic is over approaching its third decade in circulation!) the logic holds and can be applied to a variety of films set in a historical context: I think of...

A close friend who started a financial loan business took thirty of his executives to the poverty- and violence-filled section of Montreal where he grew up in order to introduce them to the section of...

The movie The Intern did not win any Academy Awards, which is hardly surprising. Punchy blockbuster comedies rarely receive Hollywood’s highest honors. But its message is nevertheless award wort...

In a quiet hospital room in North Carolina, an eager young doctor with a bright future evaluates his elderly patient with not much future left at all. She has a terminal heart condition, inoperable. A...

We have never lived enough. Our experience is, without fiction, too confined and too parochial. Literature extends it, making us reflect and feel about what might otherwise be too distant for feeling....

Stories are inherently interesting. Discourse we tolerate; to story we attend. Story entertains, informs, involves, motivates, authenticates, and mirrors existence. By creating a narrative world, stor...

As an amateur yet serious student of the American Civil War, I am constantly amazed at the sheer volume of material, which was preserved orally for half a century and longer, surrounding the key figur...

My kids love the movie Remember the Titans . It’s the story of the integration of the TC WIlliams High School Football Team in Alexandria, Virginia, in the 1960s Civil Rights era. The white players a...

I believe we all need to reframe our stories, at least parts of them, in order to heal, to discard lies, to move from partial truths to richer, fuller explanations, to see our lives as God sees them.

One of the dearest indications of a flawed life story is its failure to give one the sense of purpose and conviction necessary to live life with an acceptable degree of optimism and resolve. A failed ...

It's in our biology to trust what we see with our eyes. This makes living in a carefully edited, overproduced and photoshopped world very dangerous.

A good story goes beyond just describing what actually happened. It tells us about how the world works more broadly, in ways that pertain to things that didn’t actually happen or at least haven’t happ...

History is always a matter of trying to think into the minds of people who think differently from ourselves.

Make a point of watching quality documentaries: a study by the BBC and the University of California, Berkeley, found that viewing nature programmes increased feelings of awe, amusement and joy while r...

From [age three] on out, stories will not only entertain you, they will explain you to others and to yourself.

Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue reconnected thinking about ethics back to virtue by connecting virtue to the story a life is a part of. In order to know how we ought to live, we first need to answ...

A name is a seed. When it germinates it becomes a story.

It is a spiritual disaster for a man to rest content with his exterior identity, with his passport picture of himself. Is his life merely in his fingerprints?

In a short story, Jhumpa Lahiri writes about Mr. Kapasi, a man who translates to a city physician what rural Indian people say about their illnesses. When Mr. Kapasi complains to a friend, Mrs. Das, t...

We are a couple of decades past the vastly popular initial run of the TV show The X-Files, but its themes continue to resonate. In the show, two FBI agents, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, investigate par...

Have you ever noticed that we often see ourselves, specifically our bodies, our facial features differently? In 2013 the soap company Dove decided to explore this phenomenon by hiring an FBI-trained f...

In his thoughtful book, Our Good Crisis: Overcoming Moral Chaos with the Beatitudes , Jonathan K. Dodson points out our blind-spots with respect to pride: We rarely think of ourselves as proud. I...

In the blockbuster 2017 Marvel movie Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 , the protagonist Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) meets his absentee father, Ego (Kurt Russell) who turns out to be an alien, a "Cel...

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story.

I have been reading poems, romances, vision literature, legends, and myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know none of them are like this. Of this [gospel] text there are only two possible ...

One looks for an image of man, attempting in a world increasingly dehumanized to realize himself as a man—to act like a responsible moral being, not to drift like a mere thing.

Race is about the American story, and about each of our own stories. Overcoming racism is more than an issue or a cause — it is also a story, which can be part of each of our stories, too. The story a...

If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can't survive.

The following story is a great analogy to what life is like before we find we experience the eternal truth of the gospel. In Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Richard Dreyfuss’s...