A bunch of young Jesuits launched a new website yesterday called The Jesuit Post.  Content will range very widely indeed.  The first batch of articles  include pieces on David Foster Wallace, parish masses, Tim Tebow, yoga, Paula Deen, the folk-rock band Hem, and health care reform.  Editor Paddy Gilger, SJ says “this site is about Jesus, politics, and pop-culture, it’s about the Catholic Church, sports, and Socrates.  It’s about making the case for God (better: letting God make the case for Himself) in our secular age.”

Go take a look.

There have been rumblings about director Martin Scorsese making a film of Shusaku Endo’s magnificent historical novel Silence, about Japanese martyrs of the 17th century.  Now it seems that the rumor may become a reality, according to Spero Forum.

In a preface to Endo’s book, Scorsese writes perceptively about faith:

How do you tell the story of Christian faith? The difficulty, the crisis, of believing? How do you describe the struggle? … Shusaku Endo understood the conflict of faith, the necessity of belief fighting the voice of experience.  The voice that always urges the faithful – the questioning faithful – to adapt their beliefs to the world they inhabit, their culture…That’s a paradox, and it can be an extremely painful one: on the face of it, believing and questioning are antithetical.  Yet I believe that they go hand in hand.  One nourishes the other.  Questioning may lead to great loneliness, but if it co-exists with faith – true faith, abiding faith – it can end in the most joyful sense of communion.  It’s this painful, paradoxical passage – from certainty to doubt to loneliness to communion – that Endo understands so well, and renders so clearly, carefully and beautifully in Silence.

I, for one, can’t wait to see the film.

Fr. Jim Martin stops by the Colbert Report to promote his new book, Between Heaven and Mirth. Laughter ensues.  (Click here if you can’t see the video.)

I went to see the new movie The Way this week, and I can warmly recommend it.  It’s one of those movies that causes you to ask “How can they make an interesting movie out of that?”  Recent examples are Moneyball (statistical analysis changes the way front office executives put together baseball teams) and The Social Network (a Harvard nerd creates a popular website).  Like those movies, The Way is gripping.  I’m only afraid that it will close before people find out how good it is.

The Way is about four broken people walking the pilgrimage route in France and northern Spain called the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.  The central character is Tom Avery, a lapsed Catholic physician played by Martin Sheen, whose son had been killed in an accident at the beginning of the pilgrimage.  He’s walking the route in his son’s place.  Along the way he’s joined by a garrulous Dutchman, an angry Canadian woman, and a sarcastic Irishman.  You can’t call them believers, but you can’t exactly call them unbelievers either.  Things happen along the way that are disturbing, funny, sad, and touching–none of it especially dramatic.  The drama of the movie is the inner pilgrimage that occurs on the long 500-mile walk.  All four had stated reasons for making the pilgrimage.  By the end each has a better idea of the real reason.

If you see the movie you’ll probably think about walking the Camino yourself someday.  If you’re truly adventurous, think about walking the brand new Camino Ignaciano, a pilgrimage route that follows the journey St. Ignatius took from his home to Manresa after his conversion.  Details here.

A couple of Jesuit editors have noted that the death of Steve Jobs elicited emotion akin to the to the feelings religious believers have for saints.  Jim Martin, SJ, author of My Life with the Saints, draws seven parallels between Jobs’ life and those of saints.  One of them:

He was the object of a cult. By this I don’t mean the common definition of a “cult” (a group of crazies surrounding an even crazier leader).  Rather, the “cult” that surrounds the saint (and that is the term used) is simply a group of admirers who follow carefully the saint’s teachings, study his or life and meditate on his or her writings.

Antonio Spadaro, SJ, editor of of the Jesuit journal La Civiltà Cattolica, compared Jobs to St. Ignatius:

In his Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius wrote that one way of making an important choice is to examine how one would go about making that decision if he knew he were about to die.  Jobs told the new graduates in 2005: “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.”

Fr. Martin and Fr. Spadaro were both careful to note that they did not claim that Steve Jobs was actually a saint.

Image by aaipodpics under Creative Commons license.

Our sister blog Picturing God: Faces and Traces of the Divine celebrates its first anniversary tomorrow. The blog has featured images of nature, people, objects, and places, all evoking God’s presence. I love it. Many of the pictures are extraordinary. It’s a daily way to experience finding God in all things.

To celebrate, Loyola Press is giving away Ignatian Inspiration calendars to five lucky people who comment on the Picturing God page. Details here. Check out the site if you haven’t already, and considering subscribing to receive the daily picture by e-mail.

Yesterday the Loyola Press 3-Minute Retreat received its 10,000th “like” on Facebook.  Try it if you’re looking for a good way to pray in the spirit of Ignatius.  Here’s what Elizabeth Cruz in the Philippines says about it:

Visiting your website and religiously doing the 3 minute retreat refreshes me and an awesome experience to encounter God everyday. Doing the 3 minute retreat in the morning before work gives me extra energy for the day while doing it in the evening before going to bed makes me peaceful and calm. It invigorates me.

Last month Other6, a web community dedicated to helping its members experience God in all things, marked its 20,000th post.  This is another excellent resource for prayer from Loyola Press.

Don’t forget to enter our contest to win a copy of Paul Coutinho’s book Ignatian Pathway.  Details here.

It’s time for what I’m calling IgnatiusFest—the month-long celebration of all things Ignatian that’s becoming an annual tradition here on IgnatianSpirituality.com.  Festivities begin tomorrow, July 1, and continue until St. Ignatius’s feast day on July 31.

We have a calendar called 31 Days with St. Ignatius which offers something deliciously Ignatian for each day of the month.  Just click on the link and you’ll be taken to that day’s video, blog post, prayer, or article.

We’re inviting you to join in.  Please add your own reflections about the way you’ve been touched by St. Ignatius and the spiritual outlook that bears his name.  Put them in the comments, and I’ll highlight them throughout the month.

The Jesuits sponsor some impressive websites devoted to commentary on culture and politics.  The busiest is America magazine.  Its blog “In All Things” is especially interesting.  The editors have recently added a weekly podcast. The British Jesuits’ Thinking Faith has lively film reviews and articles. (They recently ran a very thoughtful review of my book about the Examen, A Simple, Life-Changing Prayer.)  The Jesuits in Australia operate a very energetic online magazine called Eureka Street.  Happy browsing.

Yesterday I accompanied a group of 50 Boston College students to see the film Of Gods and Men (Des Hommes et Des Dieux), the story of the kidnapping and murder of the monks of Tibhirine, in Algeria, in 1996. (I’ve also written on this film here.)  It’s a beautifully told and acted story: the film won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival this year.

The film takes its title from Psalm 82:

The gods neither know nor understand, wandering about in darkness, and all the world’s foundations shake.

I declare: “Gods though you be, offspring of the Most High all of you,

Yet like any mortal you shall die; like any prince you shall fall.”

The film captures the beautiful friendships among the monks, and between the monks and the Muslim villagers who fear for their safety during a period of terror unleashed by extremists.

In probing the human condition, the film illustrates the Psalmist’s point: everyone who is not God gets justice wrong.  In John 10:34, Jesus cites this same psalm in a response to his detractors.  Their presumption in judging him for blasphemy is an example, Jesus says, of the human tendency to play God.

The monks struggle with the decision to stay and accompany the villagers in a difficult time, or to leave the monastery and return to their homeland in France.  It is a story of discernment.  In deciding to stay, they realize that they will likely die.  The great mystery of the film is the great mystery of faith: that friendship with God lived in friendship with those whom God gives us to love often means walking calmly toward suffering, in imitation of Jesus.  During this Lenten season, if you are able to see this film consider it a latter-day exercise of the Stations of the Cross.