Essence

Should Christians read Nietzsche?

I've said it before but we need a luxuriously produced drama series conveying the visual richness, historical intrigues, and sheer beauty of Byzantium.

Martin Scorsese on why he made 'Silence' (2016) & how the protagonist played by Andrew Garfield achieves the ultimate truth of Christianity: "What true faith is or what true Christianity is has always been foremost in my mind my whole life, no matter what I’ve done. Even going back to 'Mean Streets', the opening line is ‘you don’t make up for your sins in a church, you do it in the street, you do it at home. All the rest is bullsh!t’. Meaning that you don’t separate religion, go into a building and then go outside and behave differently. The struggle is outside. You know, inside you might get some support or you might find it through chanting, through rituals, through meditation, all this sort of thing. In any event, with 'Silence' (2016), the real mystery of the apostasy is that he (Father Rodrigues, played by Andrew Garfield) gives up the truth that he is in Japan to share with everyone. He gives up the truth and ultimately achieves the real truth of Christianity, which is a stripping away of the self and emptying the self, not having anything left to be proud of. That fascinated me. How do you go there? To that place? That took me different ways, to making ‘Kundun’ (1997); ‘The Last Tempation of Christ’ (1988) certainly, but this book, 'Silence', fascinated me and it took me years to come around to it." ('5 Things we learned at the Silence Press Conference: Scorsese on Faith & why he doesn’t watch new films', James Kleinmann, Heyuguys, 2016)

Kierkegaard: “Wherever the crowd is, there is untruth…since a crowd either renders the single individual wholly unrepentant and irresponsible, or weakens his responsibility by making it a fraction of his decision… The crowd is untruth. There is therefore no one who has more contempt for what it is to be a human being than those who make it their profession to lead the crowd…Therefore was Christ crucified, because he, even though he addressed himself to all, would not have to do with the crowd”