News - January 2020

I have been reading and prayerfully reflecting on Veronica Rolf’s book, published by Cascade Books, Eugene, Oregon, 2019, 243 pp. It is an extraordinary read with a foreword by Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury. In the introduction, Rolf reminds us that“Scripture is a love story. It is the saga of God wooing and humanity wavering; God promising and humanity responding; God commanding and humanity disobeying; God being faithful and humanity mostly unfaithful; God forgiving and humanity repenting.”Rolf points to the radical unconditionality of God’s love. She asks us to reclaim an attitude of ardent expectation as a vibrant but often neglected aspect of our faith. The book appears in ten chapters, many of them soaked deeply in excellent biblical analysis but also always pointing to us. The subtitle, “The Story of our Lives in Sacred Scripture” is central to the thrust of the book.

Much as I was delighted at the religious integrity of the film, The Two Popes, I was even more swept away by the religious film about Franz Jagerstatter, A Hidden Life. Terence Malick has equaled in many ways his earlier films Days of Heaven and Tree of Life (the latter won the Palme D’Or in 2011 at Cannes).