Tag: beauty

Roundup: “Beauty Is Oxygen,” SparkShorts, and more

Victoria Emily Jones3 Comments

SPOTIFY PLAYLIST: August 2024 (Art & Theology): An assortment of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, old and new.

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OBITUARIES:

>> Jürgen Moltmann (1926–2024): Jürgen Moltmann, one of the leading Christian theologians of the twentieth century, died June 3 at age ninety-eight. His conversion to Christianity began while he was a German soldier in a POW camp in Belgium during World War II, and he afterward spent most of his career as a theology professor at the University of Tübingen, confronting the theological implications of Auschwitz, among other topics. The pastors of the first church I joined as an adult were deeply influenced by Moltmann (and his protégé Miroslav Volf), so I have been shaped by his theology, especially in the areas of theodicy (which he binds inextricably to Christology) and eschatology.

Moltmann challenged the classical doctrine of divine impassibility, which says God does not feel pain or have emotions, in his seminal book The Crucified God (1974), articulating how God the Father, not just God the Son, is a being who feels and is moved and who also suffered on Good Friday; understanding this, he says, is key to understanding how God relates to the suffering of the world. In Theology of Hope (1964), Moltmann tackled eschatology, which he defines not as the theology of last things but as the theology of hope; not of the end of time but of the fullness of time toward which God is moving all creation, even now. The gospel, he says, must be taken as good news not just of a past event (the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ) but also of a promised future, with vast implications for the present.

>> Bernice Johnson Reagon (1942–2024): Bernice Johnson Reagon [previously], a civil rights activist who cofounded The Freedom Singers and later started the African American vocal ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, died July 16 at age eighty-one. I’m so inspired by her Christian witness through nonviolent resistance and music—her songs are on regular rotation in my house.

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PODCAST EPISODES:

>> “Beauty Is Oxygen with Wesley Vander Lugt,” Maybe I’m Amazed, June 21, 2024: Dr. James Howell speaks with Dr. Wes Vander Lugt—a pastor, theologian, writer, educator, Kinship Plot cofounder, and director of the Leighton Ford Center for Theology, the Arts, and Gospel Witness at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Charlotte—about his new book, Beauty Is Oxygen: Finding a Faith That Breathes.

Beauty isn’t necessarily pretty, pleasant, soothing, Vander Lugt says. Beauty is whatever makes our being gasp a little—whether in delight, or in terrified awe. Beauty demands attention. It also dislodges us from the center of the story, Vander Lugt continues—it unselfs us, in a way, curving us outward. It can be present in what’s torn. (“God goes belonging to every riven thing,” as the poet Christian Wiman puts it.)

I was struck by a remark that Howell, the host, who is a pastor, made near the beginning of the conversation: he said preachers should be less like an instructor imparting moral lessons and more like a docent at an art museum who points out the beauty of the paintings, drawing people’s eyes to its various aspects. What a compelling way to frame the ministry of preaching!

>> Malcolm Guite on Poetry and the Imagination, The Habit: Conversations with Writers about Writing (Rabbit Room), May 7, 2020: In the eleventh poem of his “Station Island” cycle, Seamus Heaney writes about “the need and chance // To salvage everything, to re-envisage / The zenith and glimpsed jewels of any gift / Mistakenly abased.” In this podcast episode, poet-priest Malcolm Guite [previously] talks with host Jonathan Rogers about the “salvaging of the mistakenly abased gift of imagination.” Imagination, Guite says, is as much a truth-bearing faculty as reason; in order to know things well, wemust engage the imagination. It’s not about a private, subjective world or inward fantasies devised to compensate for the cruelty of the world; it’s about truly seeing.

One of the gifts mistakenly abased by our culture for about the last two or three hundred years is the gift of the imagination. We’ve sidelined it so it’s only about the subjective, [whereas] out there is the objective world of dry, rational facts. And we’ve abased that gift of intuitively knowing the truth and value of things and expressing that in warm and poetic imagery, rather than simply reducing everything to a set of tiny particles or mathematical formulae.

—Malcolm Guite

The Romantic poets, for example, Guite says, “aimed at awakening the mind’s attention, removing the film of familiarity and restoring to us that vision of the freshness and depth of nature for which we have eyes that see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand. So they weren’t trying to make stuff up. They were trying to take away this film which [Samuel Taylor Coleridge] says our selfishness and solicitousness have cast over the world, and unveil a deeper but equally real truth about nature which is more than just the surfaces we see.”

Also in this conversation, Guite reveals the poet who made him want to be a poet, the poem that prompted his reconversion to Christianity, what we lost when poetry changed from oral to written, and why he writes poetry in meter.

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SHORT FILM SERIES: SparkShorts, produced by Pixar, streaming on Disney+: Did you know Pixar Animation Studios launched an experimental shorts initiative in 2017, giving employees the opportunity, through funding and resourcing, to flex their creative muscles with a great measure of freedom? “The SparkShorts program is designed to discover new storytellers, explore new storytelling techniques, and experiment with new production workflows,” says Pixar President Jim Morris. “These films are unlike anything we’ve ever done at Pixar, providing an opportunity to unlock the potential of individual artists and their inventive filmmaking approaches on a smaller scale than our normal fare.”

Eleven SparkShorts have been released since 2019, all streaming on Disney+. Here are my favorites:

>> Self, dir. Searit Kahsay Huluf: Released February 2, 2024, this stop-motion–CGI hybrid is about a woman who self-sabotages to belong. Writer-director Searit Kahsay Huluf says it was inspired by her family story: her mother immigrated to the US from Ethiopia to escape a civil war and had to learn how to assimilate without losing herself, and as a second-generation African immigrant growing up in Los Angeles, she herself wrestled with identity issues. The way in which Huluf tells the story is beautiful, clever, and kind of dark! Notice the differentiation of textures and sound between the wood of the main character (portrayed by a puppet) and the metal of the “Goldies.”

Self SparkShort

>> Float, dir. Bobby Rubio: A father discovers his infant son has a unique characteristic that differentiates him from others and then tries to hide him to avoid judgment—but when doing so visibly deflates his son’s spirit, he vulnerably releases him out into the world to be who he is. Writer-director Bobby Rubio created Float for his son, Alex, who is on the autism spectrum. As a dad, Rubio initially struggled with the diagnosis, and this is his story of learning to embrace the beauty of it. It’s one of the few portrayals of a Filipino American family on film, and a warmhearted celebration of neurodivergence—or any other type of divergence.

Float SparkShort

>> Nona, dir. Louis Gonzales: Nona is looking forward to a day to herself to just chill in front of the TV, watching her favorite show, E.W.W. Smashdown Wrestling. But when her five-year-old granddaughter is unexpectedly dropped off, she has to adapt her plans—begrudgingly at first. Writer-director Louis Gonzales says Nona is based on his own grandma, with whom he shared a love of wrestling. I appreciate how the film addresses dealing with disruptions to a cherished routine; it’s honest about the frustration (even if the disrupter is someone you love dearly!) while also showing how a gracious, go-with-the-flow attitude can unlock surprising new joys. What a fitting watch for the current season of Ordinary Time!

Nona SparkShort

“Everything Is Plundered” by Anna Akhmatova (poem)

Victoria Emily Jones2 Comments
Hansa_Between Hope and Despair
Hansa (Hans Versteeg) (Dutch, 1941–), Between Hope and Despair, 2015. Oil on canvas, 125 × 150 cm.
Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death’s great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?

By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.

And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses—
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.

This poem was originally published in Russian (title: “Все разграблено”) in Anno Domini MCMMXI by Anna Akhmatova (Petrograd: Petropolis, 1922). The above translation by Stanley Kunitz, with Max Hayward, appears in Poems of Akhmatova (Boston: Mariner Books, 1997).

Akhmatova wrote “Everything Is Plundered” in June 1921, during a time of great social and political upheaval caused by the Russian Revolution (1917), which established Communism in the country, and the resultant Russian Civil War (1917–1922). Just two months later, her first husband, the father of her nine-year-old son, would be arrested and executed as a counterrevolutionary. Despite the death and destruction she was witnessing, she did not want to abandon hope. She grasps for a miracle, which is elusive but, she senses, near—will it land?

Like the poet, I too marvel at how such ugliness and beauty can coexist in the world. For Akhmatova, it’s in large part gifts from nature, such as the scent of cherry blossoms or the sparkle of a starry night sky, that prevent her from despairing, that rekindle in her that faith-flame. When humans make a terrible and violent mess of things, there’s still the persistence of seasons and the steadiness of sky. I consider such things graces from God, reminders of God’s deep-down, benevolent, outreaching presence.

Anna Akhmatova, the pen name of Anna Andreevna Gorenko (1889–1966), is one of the most significant Russian poets of the twentieth century. She was active as a writer during both the prerevolutionary and Soviet eras, though in the latter, her work was condemned and censored by Stalinist authorities, who viewed it as too pessimistic and rooted in bourgeois culture. Though many of her friends emigrated out of the country to escape oppression, she chose not to, believing that her poetry would die if she left her homeland; she wanted to stay and bear witness to the events around her, and to hold out hope for a better tomorrow. One of Akhmatova’s most famous poem cycles, Requiem, she wrote while her only child, Lev Gumilev, was detained in Kresty prison in 1938 along with hundreds of other victims of the Great Terror; he would spend the next two decades in forced-labor camps. It wasn’t until the late 1980s, after her death, that Akhmatova achieved full recognition for her literary accomplishments in her native Russia, when all her previously unpublishable works finally became accessible to the public.

Roundup: Worship album by Parchman inmates, major new acquisition at Toledo Museum of Art, and more

Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

SPOTIFY PLAYLIST: November 2023 (Art & Theology): In this month’s playlist I nod, in part, to All Saints’ Day (November 1), Christ the King Sunday (November 26), and world events. It includes “Ad Ana” (How Long), a setting of Psalm 13 in its original Hebrew by Miqedem (a Tel Aviv–based band made up of Shai Sol [previously] and three other musical artists from a mix of Jewish and Christian backgrounds), and “Touba” (Blessed), a sung recitation of the Beatitudes in Arabic by the Sakhnini Brothers [previously], Arab Christians from Nazareth, with oud and keyboard accompaniment.

As American Thanksgiving is November 23, you may also want to check out my Thanksgiving Playlist, comprising songs of gratitude. Originally created in 2021, each year I add to and remix the list as I encounter new recordings. One of the newer additions is “He Has Made Me Glad” by Leona Von Brethorst, based on Psalm 100, as arranged and performed on organ by the amazing Cory Henry.

The Christian life consists of both praise and lament, both tears and laughter—which is why in any given worship service or Art & Theology playlist or blog post, as in the biblical psalter, you can find songs that express joy and others, heaviness. They don’t negate one another but rather give fuller expression to the breadth of religious experience.

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NEW ALBUM: Some Mississippi Sunday Morning by Parchman Prison Prayer: After a bureaucratic process that took over three years, music producer Ian Brennan was finally granted permission in February to record a Sunday worship service at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, aka Parchman Farm, a notorious prison with a rich musical history. The prison chaplains convened a unique service of inmate singers from various Christian denominations ranging in age from twenties to seventies, who were given turns at the mic and even collaborated on a few tracks. Brennan said he wanted to give the men a platform for their voices to be heard. All profits from the album benefit the Mississippi Department of Corrections Chaplain Services.

Here’s “You Did Not Leave Me, You Bless Me Still,” a cover of a Melvin Williams gospel song sung by J. Sherman, age sixty-three.

“You can hear the way Sunday services are particularly restorative for someone incarcerated – not simply because of the promise of redemption, but the solace of not being alone,” writes Sheldon Pearce for the Guardian. “Some Mississippi Sunday Morning feels like these men reaching out for the things such a barbaric system tries to deny them: compassion, intimacy, and mercy. The songs are not just purges of anxieties accrued on the inside or calls for the Lord’s embrace, but also pleas to be acknowledged as a person and not an ID number.”

(Thanks to Art & Theology reader Ted Olsen for alerting me to this! He compared the album to Angola Prison Spirituals, recorded in the 1950s.)

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PODCAST EPISODE: “Sarah Clarkson: The Gift of Beauty,” Life with God: A Renovaré Podcast, October 20, 2023: Sarah Clarkson, author of This Beautiful Truth: How God’s Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness, speaks with Renovaré community life director Nathan Foster about her struggle with OCD and, amid the great suffering wrought by that illness, how God’s goodness has been mediated to her by beauty—in nature, poetry, music, story, tea, ritual, and so on. Responding to the idea that beauty is a luxury for the affluent, she says, “Well, [it is] if beauty is about having a perfect house. But beauty is healing those who have been hurt in a war zone. It’s creating shelters where children can have refuge. It’s rebuilding what has been destroyed. . . . Beauty is a defiance of the forces of evil and disorder and destruction because it is [their] opposite: where evil tears down, beauty creates; where there is absence, beauty fills.”

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PRESS RELEASE: “Toledo Museum of Art Adds Armenian Gospel Manuscript with 46 Paintings to the Collection”: After centuries passing through private collections, in June the Pozzi Gospels, a sixteenth-century illuminated manuscript from Armenia, entered the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art, which will make it more accessible to the public. (I’m not sure when the book will go on display. And it doesn’t have an object page on the museum’s website yet.) The artist and scribe of this extraordinary, sumptuous manuscript was Hakob Jughayets’i. His forty-six full-page miniatures and marginal decorations combine Christian iconography with Byzantine, Islamic, and Buddhist design elements. 

The Sam Fogg gallery, which exhibited the manuscript last year as part of The Medieval Body, created this short video about it, narrated by art historian Jack Hartnell:

Creation of Eve and Temptation (Pozzi Gospels)
Hakob Jughayets’i (Armenian, ca. 1550–1613), The Pozzi Gospels, 1586. Paper with blind-stamped brown leather binding, 403 folios with 46 full-page illuminations and numerous marginal miniatures, 7 3/4 × 5 3/4 in. (19.8 × 14.5 cm). This spread shows the Creation of Eve and the Temptation of Eve.

The Pozzi Gospels is one of nine extant illuminated manuscripts by Hakob. For more information, see Hakob’s Gospels: The Life and Work of an Armenian Artist of the Sixteenth Century by Timothy Greenwood and Edda Vardanyan (2006).

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VIRTUAL MUSIC COLLECTION: Armenian Spiritual Music Special Vol. 1: NTS Radio in London has curated ninety minutes of traditional Armenian Christian music. (They’ve done the same for Byzantine chant, Welsh hymns, Hildegard von Bingen, and numerous other categories.) I wish the lyrics and translations were provided, but regardless of my understanding of the words, what beauty. [HT: ImageUpdate]

Roundup: Pool of Bethesda, Argentine tango hymn, Ernesto Cardenal, beauty and suffering, “Spiritual Cosmonaut” playlist, and “The Two Popes”

Victoria Emily Jones3 Comments

VISUAL COMMENTARIES: “The Pool of Bethesda” by Naomi Billingsley: In a recent contribution to the online Visual Commentary on Scripture [previously], Naomi Billingsley has compiled and written about three artworks based on John 5:1–18, a story in which Jesus heals a paralyzed man at a reservoir in Jerusalem. A source of hydration, cleansing, and tranquility, the pool of Bethesda, Billingsley says, is a symbol that transcends individual religious traditions.

Pool of Bethesda

She discusses William Hogarth’s painting of the subject for a hospital, showing sick patients receiving care; a “Dreamtime” drawing from Aboriginal Australian artist Trevor Nickolls’s Bethesda series, created during his recovery from a major car accident; and The Angel of the Waters fountain in Bethesda Terrace in Manhattan’s Central Park, designed by Emma Stebbins in 1842 to celebrate an aqueduct that brought clean water to New York City and improved public health (and which you may recognize as the site where John the Baptist baptizes disciples in the opening sequence of the movie Godspell).

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ARGENTINE TANGO HYMN: “Tenemos Esperanza” (We Have Hope): This hymn text was written in 1979 by Federico Pagura (1923–2016), a Methodist bishop and human rights champion from Argentina, and set to tango music by Homero Perera (1939–2019) of Uruguay. Argentinian pastor Federico “Fede” Apecena, who lives in Georgia in the US, recently introduced the song to his friend Josh Davis, who heads the multicultural worship ministry Proskuneo, and the two banged out this awesome video performance. “The song is a record of all that Jesus came to do and to be,” Apecena explains at the end of the video. [HT: Global Christian Worship]

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OBITUARY: Ernesto Cardenal (1925–2020), poet and priest who mixed religion and politics in his commitment to social justice in Nicaragua, dies at 95: A Catholic priest, poet, and political revolutionary from Nicaragua, Ernesto Cardenal was a controversial figure. He supported the Sandinista insurrection against the dictatorial Somoza regime in the seventies and, when the Sandinista government (which claimed to integrate Marxist and Christian ideals) came to power, served as its minister of culture from 1979 to 1987. He viewed this post as an extension of his priestly office and, refusing to quit it at Pope John Paul II’s behest, was forthwith suspended from the priesthood in 1984. (Pope Francis absolved him of canonical censure in February 2019, permitting him to administer the sacraments once again.)

Cardenal’s most enduring achievement was his 1966 founding of a religious community among the peasant farmers and fishermen of the Solentiname archipelago in Lake Nicaragua. He saw to the construction of a small wooden church, where he led collaborative Masses: instead of giving a homily on the week’s assigned Gospel reading, he opened up dialogues about it with his parishioners, relishing their insights. Transcripts of these conversations were published in four volumes as El Evangelio en Solentiname (The Gospel in Solentiname) between 1975 and 1977, with English translations appearing in 1976–82—a classic work of liberation theology.

Besides cultivating the islanders’ interest in the Bible, Cardenal also took notice of their creative talents. He brought in artists to lead workshops, which led to the development of a primitivist art school that achieved international recognition for its paintings, many of them depicting Jesus’s birth, ministry, and passion taking place in Solentiname, in and around the familiar thatched-roof buildings, blue waters, and lush vegetation. In 1984 Orbis Books editors Philip and Sally Scharper combined several such images with a heavily abridged version of The Gospel in Solentiname and published it as The Gospel in Art by the Peasants of Solentiname, a slim, full-color hardcover that I highly recommend.

Guevara, Gloria_Visitation
Gloria Guevara (Nicaraguan, 1954–), The Visitation, 1981 [source: The Gospel in Art by the Peasants of Solentiname]
“It was the Gospel which radicalized us politically,” Cardenal said. “The peasants began to understand the core of the Gospel message: the announcement of the kingdom of God, that is, the establishment on this earth of a just society, without exploiters or exploited.” Afraid of the dangerous ideas taking root in Solentiname, Somoza’s National Guard razed the settlement to the ground in 1977, and Cardenal was forced to flee to Costa Rica. He gave his blessing to his community’s decision to join the Sandinistas, the people’s army, to attempt an overthrow of Somoza, a victory they achieved in 1979. The surviving peasants returned to Solentiname to rebuild, and their practice of art and faith continues to thrive to the present day.

Cardenal is also known as a poet. I’ve read only one volume of his poetry, in English translation: Apocalypse: And Other Poems (New Directions, 1977). I didn’t connect well with a lot of it, but it does have a few gems, like “Prayer for Marilyn Monroe,” “The Cosmos Is His Sanctuary (Psalm 150),” and “Behind the Monastery,” reprinted here in full:

Behind the monastery, down the road,
there is a cemetery of worn-out things
where lie smashed china, rusty metal,
cracked pipes and twisted bits of wire,
empty cigarette packs, sawdust,
corrugated iron, old plastic, tires beyond repair:
all waiting for the Resurrection, like ourselves.

(translated from the Spanish by Robert Pring-Mill)

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LECTURE: “On Beauty” by Natalie Carnes: “Beauty has been leveraged in ways that wound us, with legacies of misogyny, class hatred, and racial injustice,” says Dr. Natalie Carnes, associate professor of theology at Baylor University. “And yet I want to suggest that beauty tends those same wounds, and can be found in those same wounds, for beauty is a name for God.”

In this half-hour talk given November 1, 2017, at Dallas Theological Seminary as part of school’s Arts Week, Carnes examines the paradox, expressed in the church’s art and theology across history, that God is both beautiful and not beautiful. In his suffering, Carnes says—his entering the ravaged and scarred places of our humanity—God does not renounce his beauty but reveals it.

The divine presence in grotesque suffering is not a departure from the divine life but characteristic of it. And that movement into the grotesque is not antagonistic to beauty but the revelation of it. God’s faithfulness goes by way of intimacy with not-God, and beauty by way of the grotesque. The beauty that rejects suffering is false, and the one who follows the call of beauty faithfully will find herself in the scarred places of the world. Beauty, after all, is a name for God, and God does not abandon divinity in identifying with the suffering and afflicted but expresses through such identification the very marker of divine life.

This is not to say that suffering, affliction, or poverty is beautiful. Beauty is distinct from the mode of its arriving. Poverty and suffering can be important sites of beauty, even as they are not themselves beautiful, because they mediate the beauty of the God who is charity. . . .

Beauty and Suffering
Left: Michelangelo, Last Judgment (detail), 1536–41 | Right: Matthais Grünewald, Isenheim Altarpiece (detail), 1515

Natalie Carnes is the author of Beauty: A Theological Engagement with Gregory of Nyssa, Image and Presence: A Christological Reflection on Iconoclasm and Iconophilia, and (forthcoming) Motherhood: A Confession.

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PLAYLIST: “Spiritual Cosmonaut,” compiled by Latifah Alattas: Last month singer-songwriter and music producer Latifah Alattas [previously] curated a short Spotify playlist of “Spiritual songs that stir my soul. Melodies that tap into mystery. Sounds that open me up to the wonder and peace of God.” It’s great!

Alattas is the frontwoman of the band Page CXVI [previously], which has just returned from a six-year hiatus. I’m so moved by their recently released rendition of “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” with piano, synthesizer, and pedal steel guitar. Alattas has made the song more communal, subbing out all first-person singular pronouns for first-person plural, even rewording whole lines, like the last two of the chorus, which become “Amidst the pain of this world you grieve with us—unfailing faithfulness, dwelling so near.” Or the final line of the final verse, which she changed from “Blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside!” to “Blessings for all, Christ within us resides.”

People who are attached to singing the song a certain way might object to such lyrical revisions, but I see them, along with the creative musical liberties she takes, as helping to bring out the themes that are already there. Alattas helped me to hear this classic hymn with new ears.

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FILM: The Two Popes (2019), dir. Fernando Meirelles: I recently watched this Oscar-nominated biographical drama and enjoyed it more than I thought I would! I wasn’t expecting the respect it gives to its subjects and to Christianity. Its title refers to the fact that, for the first time in six hundred years, the Roman Catholic Church has one reigning pope and one retired pope, the “pope emeritus.” (When Benedict announced his resignation in 2013, it shocked the world, as it’s expected that, if chosen, you serve in that role until death.)

The movie is primarily about the relationship between the traditionalist Pope Benedict XVI (born Joseph Ratzinger) and the progressive Pope Francis (born Jorge Bergoglio), which starts out antagonistically but buds into a friendship of sorts. It’s dialogue-heavy (it was adapted from a stage play), but in the most interesting way, as the two engage in “a series of philosophical and dogmatic discussions and disagreements about the nature of faith and forgiveness, and the direction of a church struggling to maintain relevance in the modern world” [source].

But it’s not just about the church’s struggle or the burdens of high office; it’s also about personal faith as a struggle—how to discern one’s calling in life, how to hear God’s voice and deal with his silence, and how to forgive oneself for one’s own tragic silences (in Benedict’s case, regarding the sex abuse perpetrated by clergy; in Francis’s, regarding the Dirty War in his home country of Argentina in the late seventies and early eighties, while he was serving as priest).

Francis’s backstory, of which I knew nothing beforehand, is told in flashbacks. (The fiancée is fictional, though the real Francis has admitted to having romantic crushes as a teenager and even as a seminarian.) The portrayal of both men, by Anthony Hopkins as Benedict and Jonathan Pryce as Francis, is very humanizing (not initially for Benedict, but his character gets there)—and not just because of the glimpse it provides into Francis’s life prior to the cloth, but also, in part, because of little nods it gives to their interests beyond the church, like Francis’s love of soccer and tango dancing, and Benedict’s piano playing and Fanta drinking. And because it shows their personal fallibility, their regret over past misdeeds.

It should be noted that the meeting of the two men at the papal summer residence of Castel Gandolfo prior to Benedict’s resignation is invented, as are many of their lengthy dialogues, which are nonetheless inspired by speeches, letters, and other writings of theirs, brought into conversation with one another by playwright and screenwriter Anthony McCarten.