"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

"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

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