November 20, 2002

Pastor Jim Ball has a message for car buyers. “Most people don’t think the kind of car they drive has anything to do with their faith. We want to show them how it does.” Ball plans a campaign based on one question: What would Jesus drive? “Evangelical Christians,” he says, “ought to relate everything we do to the Lordship of Christ.”

Don Saliers holds the William R. Cannon Distinguished Chair in Theology and Worship at Emory University and directs the Masters of Sacred Music Program. He is the founder and director of the Emory Chamber Players, and since 1975 has served as the organist and choirmaster for the Sunday service in Emory’s Cannon Chapel. A United Methodist minister, Don is widely known in ecumenical circles for his lecturing and writing on liturgical renewal, music and liturgy.

A half hour before the Sunday morning service begins, St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco already displays the holy chaos that characterizes its worship. In the domed entrance hall a choir is practicing motets. In the rectangular “synagogue” area, where worshipers’ chairs face each other across a long raised platform, the liturgist is rehearsing readers for the service. Worship leaders in brightly colored Liberian vestments hand out spiral-bound songbooks and welcome newcomers.

Hollywood used to be highly efficient at turning out enjoyable melodramas, but that hasn't been the case for such a long time that White Oleander feels like an anomaly. It's a film about the struggles of a teenage girl against unreasonable odds--a mother who's a convicted murderer, and a series of foster homes, each of which poses its own set of challenges.

Through the decades filmmakers from assorted countries have attempted to probe the inner lives of the clergy. Pastors' lives have been approached in hushed tones, as in Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light (1963); with compassion, as in Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1950); and with a cutting edge, as in Luis Buñuel's Nazarin (1958). In 1994, a new wrinkle was added to the holy cloth with Antonia Bird's Priest, which not only addressed the issue of celibacy in the Catholic Church but zeroed in on homosexual love.