April 10, 2002

With his folksy, conversational style, Pastor Frank Harrington turned Peachtree Presbyterian Church in Atlanta into a megachurch over three decades. At its peak, Peachtree had nearly 13,000 names on its rolls—six times the membership when Harrington assumed the pulpit in 1970. On the first Sunday of 1999, membership stood at 11,800, making Peachtree the largest congregation in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

When photojournalist Harrison Lloyd (David Strathairn) disappears in Vukovar in the early days of the war in Bosnia, his wife, Sarah (Andie MacDowell), refuses to believe he's been killed. Insisting that she would know in her heart if he were dead--that "something inside me would have broken"--she sets out for Yugoslavia to find him.

While it may be coincidental that two of the most famous English-language movies of all time--Steven Spielberg's beloved E.T.--The Extra-Terrestrial and Stanley Kubrick's revered 2001: A Space Odyssey--are being rereleased in the same year, it is probably no coincidence that E.T. opened the weekend before Easter. It remains, two decades after its initial release, the most commercially successful "religious" movie of all time.