

The Secret Hero of Silence
"Judas hanged himself after betraying Jesus. Kichijiro turns himself in to be locked up with Rodrigues. The other imprisoned Christians shun Kichijiro, huddling in one corner of a cell to leave him isolated in the other. He is a sinner who has lost the trust of his brethren and must ask absolution from the very priest he double-crossed. And yet he has not despaired. He dares to believe God’s promises that He can forgive even him. After his apostasy, Rodrigues sees a new kinsh


Judas in Japan
"Scorsese’s foreword fills one with familiar dread. Here is the voice of mock piety, yet another chin-stroking sophomore speculating that the real sacrifice would be to give up one’s morals. In his discussion of Silence, Scorsese recapitulates the way he portrayed Judas as a collaborator in Jesus’s sacrifice in his own The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)—projecting his particular interpretation of Judas as pseudo-saint onto Endo: “In order for Christianity to live, to adapt


Silence and Sherlock
At First Things, I'm featured on both segments of this podcast. In the first segment, I talk about Silence (the book and the film) with Julia Yost. In the second segment, Leah and I join Julia to discuss the BBC's Sherlock, and the ways it went wrong by making its world too small—we end by imagining what guest star from a different author's detective stories could help cure the increasingly solipsistic world of Sherlock. Listen to the whole podcast below: #Podcast #FirstThin