Magazine

First Reformed presents looks at current social issues through the lens of religion and specifically the eyes of a pastor from a failing Reformed church. To its credit, it attempts to give a well-rounded view of these issues. Pastor Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke), is recently divorced and has lost his son in the Iraq war. Coming from a long line of male graduates of Virginia Military Institute, Toller had been an armed-services chaplain; he had encouraged his son to enlist…

In late October, a gunman opened fire on a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 people in the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in United States history. Earlier the same week, a white supremacist killed two black customers at a grocery store in Louisville. All of this came on the heels of an attempted mass bombing in which pipe bombs were sent to high-ranking progressive politicians, including two former presidents. Are Christians even paying attention to these levels of hate, to the…

Benedict Joseph Labre was an unemployed transient who begged around Europe for 13 years, eating refuse that other people didn’t want and clothing himself in rags. He was infested with vermin; he smelled bad. Yet fewer than a hundred years after his death in 1783, the Roman Catholic Church canonized him a saint. How and why did this happen? More important, what does it tell us about homelessness today? “The poor you will always have with you,” Christ said in…