“The answers that gave me solace as a child no longer do. . . . It would be easy to stop asking questions, but I feel that if I did stop asking those questions a little light would go off in my life, and I need to have some degree of mystery that I’m still curious about. Having that curiosity makes living my life better even though I don’t have the answers I thought I once did.”
+ David Lowery, American filmmaker and writer, at Fuller’s screening of his new film A Ghost Story, a meditation on time, grief, and attachments—all witnessed through the eyes of a ghost. Sponsored by the Brehm Center’s Reel Spirituality initiative, he was interviewed by Barry Taylor, Brehm Center’s artist-in-residence, after a screening, and the evening created space to reflect on mortality, nostalgia, and more.
+ We’re happy to share a selection from the new book God in the Movies: A Guide for Exploring Four Decades of Film. Click here for a free download of the first chapter on the robust dialogue between faith and film.
“There’s a very clear sense for a lot of people that answers we used to find helpful aren’t as helpful anymore. So we go back to ask the same questions—and maybe we get some of the same answers, or maybe we’re at a point where the answers aren’t as important as the nurturing and guarding of the questions themselves.”
+ Barry Taylor (pictured left), Brehm Center’s artist in residence, reflecting with David Lowery (right) on the connections among ghost stories, the search for faith, and our current social context.
“There is an extraordinary sequence involving his Ghost passing through ages, yet stuck still in the grand canvas of all that is and is to come. He has become our Virgil, our prophet. And I came to think that sometimes, movies can serve as a kind of tool for self-awareness, birthing from the ethereal a change of a heart once chained in a desperate stage of weariness to a kind of enduring happiness in an often heavy harsh-hardened existence.”
+ Lennox Lugo, a writer for Reel Spirituality, in his review of A Ghost Story available here.
+ Pictured: Casey Affleck as C. Photo credit: Bret Curry, courtesy of A24.