“Holy Saturday is the day we celebrate the silence of the tomb. The silence of loss. The silence of absence. The silence of graves that our love ones lay in. It’s not a fun holiday. But it’s a true one. And maybe that truth will set us free. Because the truth of loss helps us embrace the freedom of life… however fleeting it is.” –Scott Erickson

Check out Scott’s Stations of the Cross HERE

Faith-based films. (Edel Rodriguez / For the Times)

By Justin Chang

My reservations have little to do with standard criticisms like awkward performances or clunky production values — venial sins, surely, for new filmmakers trying to find their way. What rankles about a cinematic sermon like “Letters to God” or a morally offensive wartime drama like “Little Boy” isn’t the mediocrity of the craft; it’s the calculation inherent in the enterprise. There’s a smug complacency with which these movies preach a message ostensibly meant to set the world passionately ablaze.
***

Paul (James Faulkner), left, reminds Luke (Jim Caviezel) that love is the only way in “Paul, Apostle of Christ.” Photo by Mark Cassar, courtesy of CTMG

By Emily McFarlan Miller, Religion News Service

In the film, Luke (Caviezel) meets with Paul (James Faulkner) in prison to record his dramatic conversion and other reflections into what would become the Book of Acts.

Meantime, the early church struggles against persecution by the Roman government — and how to respond to it. “Christ called us to care for the world, not rule it,” one character protests when others discuss breaking into the prison to free Paul and overthrow the government.

“At this moment in our culture and in our world I think we really are starting to doubt this idea of grace and mercy and forgiveness and love, and Paul’s story is such a strong example of just the enormity of God’s grace and love, and I think it’s something that’s so needed right now,” writer-director Andrew Hyatt said.

Hyatt said he hoped the film would help viewers see biblical figures like Paul as real people, “not beautiful statues with halos on their heads” and books like Acts and Paul’s letters as “lived experience,” not something that came from a “preachy, heady space.”

Read entire column HERE

For those who observe, have a blessed Good Friday. Elvis Costello has been an essential troubadour in my life’s soundtrack. Every Good Friday, I ponder his lyrics: “How deep is the red our redeemer bled / The debt of our sins to settle? How deep is the red? How deep is the red? How deep is the red our redeemer bled?” While Costello’s not particularly religious, he asks the probing questions of an artist with a deep soul. #elviscostello

Ms. Girlee’s regular Carrie Yancy. Photo: Gately Williams.

By John T. Edge, Garden & Gun

“We’re church people,” Aaron Leach says when I ask how his family came to run a soul café on the edge of the North Memphis neighborhood known as Smokey City, once thick with factories and working-class families. “When I got called to the church, my mother started cooking.” One of six children born to Jimmie and Baxter Leach, who moved from Schlater, Mississippi, to Memphis in the late 1950s, Aaron smiles wide as he calculates the fare for my plate of braised oxtails, brothy pinto beans, stumpy okra pods, and crunchy-rimmed cornbread muffins.

The matter is settled, says that enveloping grin. But the story of Ms. Girlee’s, a celadon-walled café with a mint-and-white checkerboard floor, set on a pilgrimage-worthy superblock of three soul food standouts and a hot-tamale truck, isn’t that simple. To understand how a storefront restaurant in a strip dominated by a barber college and two beauty salons became a Memphis institution requires fluency in labor history and knowledge of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s late-career push for economic justice.

To read entire article, click HERE.