"When I speak to my pro-choice friends, I’m often able to find some common ground. They do not necessarily admit that human life has a God-given dignity, but they certainly assign it value—and even assign some value to life in the womb, though they leave this contingent on a mother’s choice. Some of my friends are sympathetic to the pro-life movement’s ideal of a world where mother and child are both offered love and support, a world less subject to the cultural and economic

"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

"Arrival stars Amy Adams as a linguist named Louise Banks who is tasked with learning how to speak to the aliens who have arrived in monolithic ships all over the earth. Her military handlers, suspicious of the extraterrestrials’ intentions, want her to do this without teaching them English. Adams convincingly plays a gifted scholar who is in over her head, until she starts seeing the world from the aliens’ viewpoint and gets glimpses beyond the limits of human consciousness.

"With Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, director David Yates and Harry Potter scribe J. K. Rowling welcome us back into the Wizarding World—and this time, they let a Muggle like us play a main character. Fantastic Beasts stars waifish magizoologist Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) but the show is stolen by magic-less interloper Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler) and his admirable, openhearted curiosity. Wizards in Prohibition-era New York, where the movie is set, are a suspici

"The comic book world lost a mad master of the form last Sunday. Tributes to him on comic book sites have been mixed in tone. One reads, “Of all the many masterful artists that we’ve covered on ComicsAlliance, it seems safe to say that Jack T. Chick is the only one to regularly be described as ‘bizarre,’ ‘grotesque,’ ‘atavistic,’ and ‘savagely anti-Catholic.’” Chick backed into comic book history almost by accident. He was an irreligious veteran who was converted to Christian

"When I ask my friends for their formative, positive male role models, the answers (real and fictional) were often men of quiet confidence and steadfast service, like St. Maximilian Kolbe or Atticus Finch of To Kill A Mockingbird. G. K. Chesterton suggests that Christian manliness is well illustrated by the medieval Christians’ creative re-reading of the Trojan War, a reading that treats Hector as the protagonist. The great loser of Homer’s story becomes the model of chivalry

"Trump’s policies, such as they are, usually come down to America breaking its promises. In the debate, he doubled-down on his previous pledge to back out of defending our NATO allies (who came to our defense after 9/11). Later in the debate he casually said we can’t defend Japan, another nation with whom we have a mutual defense treaty. This promised perfidy is of a piece with his rhetoric about tearing up deals and starting trade wars. He then brushed off the idea that stop

"Kubo and the Two Strings, the latest concoction from Laika Studios, will blow you away with its gorgeous stop-motion animation. But it will also inspire you with its compassionate story. The movie weaves a rollicking adventure yarn, but it also subverts the expected ending of a hero slaying a monster. Instead, true victory in the movie is portrayed as loving one’s enemy enough to give him a better story to tell about himself. As the tale begins, Kubo (Art Parkinson) is a bud

"Aaron Burr, Hamilton’s narrator and Hamilton’s killer, complains that Hamilton has been “seated at the right hand of the father,” elevated to Washington’s side. The Trinitarian image is ironic: Though Washington is a godly man and father-figure, Hamilton isn’t quite a spotless lamb. Inaugurating the role, Miranda played his protagonist as an irrepressible motor-mouth, committed to his ideals, hungry for fame, and susceptible to his passions. Hamilton’s involvement in America