Other Philosophy Commons^™

Scorsese’S Silence: Film As Practical Theodicy, Ian Deweese-Boyd

Journal of Religion & Film

Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence takes up the anguished experience of God’s silence in the face of human suffering. The main character, the Jesuit priest Sabastião Rodrigues, finds his faith gutted by the appalling silence of God as he witnesses the horrific persecution of Christians in seventeenth century Japan. Yujin Nagasawa calls the particularly intense combination of the problems of divine hiddenness and evil the problem of divine absence that resists resolution through explanations that have typically characterized the theodicies offered by philosophers. Drawing on the thought of Ignatius of Loyola, this essay explores the way …