Books by Dale Harris

Books by Dale Harris
A Feast of Epiphanies

Though I Walk, A Novel

Daytime Moons and Other Celestial Anomalies, a book of poems

Second Wind

Second Wind
An album of songs both old and new. Recorded in 2021, a year of major transition for me, these songs explore the many vicissitudes of the spiritual life,. It's about the mountaintop moments and the Holy Saturday sunrises, the doors He opens that no one can close, and those doors He's closed that will never open again. You can click the image above to give it a listen.

The Song Became a Child

The Song Became a Child
A collection of Christmas songs I wrote and recorded during the early days of the pandemic lockdown in the spring of 2020. Click the image to listen.

There's a Trick of the Light I'm Learning to Do

This is a collection of songs I wrote and recorded in January - March, 2020 while on sabbatical from ministry. They each deal with a different aspect or expression of the Gospel. Click on the image above to listen.

Three Hands Clapping

This is my latest recording project (released May 27, 2019). It is a double album of 22 songs, which very roughly track the story of my life... a sort of musical autobiography, so to speak. Click the album image to listen.

Ghost Notes

Ghost Notes
A collections of original songs I wrote in 2015, and recorded with the FreeWay Musical Collective. Click the album image to listen.

inversions

Recorded in 2014, these songs are sort of a chronicle of my journey through a pastoral burn-out last winter. They deal with themes of mental-health, spiritual burn-out and depression, but also with the inexorable presence of God in the midst of darkness. Click the album art to download.

soundings

soundings
click image to download
"soundings" is a collection of songs I recorded in September/October of 2013. Dealing with themes of hope, ache, trust and spiritual loss, the songs on this album express various facets of my journey with God.

bridges

bridges
Click to download.
"Bridges" is a collection of original songs I wrote in the summer of 2011, during a soul-searching trip I took out to Alberta; a sort of long twilight in the dark night of the soul. I share it here in hopes these musical reflections on my own spiritual journey might be an encouragement to others: the sun does rise, blood-red but beautiful.

echoes

echoes
Prayers, poems and songs (2005-2009). Click to download
"echoes" is a collection of songs I wrote during my time studying at Briercrest Seminary (2004-2009). It's called "echoes" partly because these songs are "echoes" of times spent with God from my songwriting past, but also because there are musical "echoes" of hymns, songs or poems sprinkled throughout the album. Listen closely and you'll hear them.

Accidentals

This collection of mostly blues/rock/folk inspired songs was recorded in the spring and summer of 2015. I call it "accidentals" because all of the songs on this project were tunes I have had kicking around in my notebooks for many years but had never found a "home" for on previous albums. You can click the image to download the whole album.

random reads

The Trajectory of a Tragicomic: Spiritual Reflections on the Filmography of Tom Hanks (VII)

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Because Tom Hanks went on to enjoy block-buster success in iconic dramatic roles like Apollo 13 and Forrest Gump, it’s easy to forget the fact that he actually got his start in comedies. His first lead role, of course, was in the quirky 1984 romantic comedy, Splash! After that came the raunchy sex comedy, Bachelor Party, then the bizarre comedy-as-spy-thriller, The Man with One Red Shoe. His first dramatic role didn’t come until 1986, when he played an advertising executive estranged from his philandering father, in Jacky Gleason’s final movie, Nothing in Common. He also did an obscure World War II film called Every Time We Say Goodbye, in 1986, but these dramatic efforts were all eclipsed by the movie that made him a household name, 1988s Big.

Tom Hanks’ career in dramatic roles didn’t begin in earnest until 1993, when he starred in both the whimsical romance, Sleepless in Seattle and the poignant legal drama, Philadelphia. He would follow those up in 1994 with Forrest Gump and Apollo 13, krazy-gluing his name to the dramatic roles and epic biopics that would turn him into an icon. But in the decade leading up to those monumental dramas, Hanks starred in 15 films, 11 of which were comedies.

I feel there is something profoundly fitting in this fact, that one of Hollywood’s most recognizable dramatic actors got his start playing comedic roles. In retrospect, many of these films seem rather cringeworthy today (like 1985s Volunteers). A few of them are blush-inducing (like 1984s Bachelor Party). And almost none of them have aged especially well. Dragnet (1987) trades primarily on juvenile sexual humor, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) is almost unwatchable in the era of Black Lives Matter, and the plot of Big (1988), when you dissect it, has all sorts of creepy implications that are probably best left unmentioned.

What is fascinating about this body of work in total, however, is the way the development of Hanks’s career reflects the trajectory of cultural sensibilities from the 80s to the present time. Inasmuch the 80s, as a decade, was emerging from the sexual liberation and drug experimentation that shook American culture in the 60s and 70s, it was, in many ways, a decade of hedonistic abandonment and easy joviality. The Vietnamese war had ended, the era of the personal computer was dawning, and the possibilities, it seemed were endless. Comedies in the 80s were willing to laugh at male sexcapades that today we would frown upon (I think rightly) as misogynistic; they were willing to make jokes about ethnic differences between people that today would be censured (again, I think rightly) as xenophobic.

Tthe era of the 80s matured into the brooding, grungy 90s, of course, with its burgeoning social consciousness and its rejection of the glam, the glitz and the glare of the 80s aesthetic. Then, in the 2000s we faced the Y2K scare, the horrors of 9/11, the Gulf War, the War on Terror, and the first tangible, unignorable signs that the climate disaster they’d been warning us about for years might really be upon us.

Then came: #MeToo, BLM, Covid-19, I Can’t Breathe, MAGA, January 1st.

Some 40 years after Tom Hanks first starred as the star-struck lover in Splash! it almost seems quaintly naïf, the ease with which that film, back then, makes jokes about a prebuescent boy trying to sneak a peak at some women’s panties (per the opening scene of the film). And it would seem quaint, perhaps, if it didn’t also seem so grimly misogynistic and objectifying.

What is interesting, though, is that even as American culture was forming its conscience over these last four decades, Tom Hanks was gradually getting out of the comedy business, and stepping into much more dramatic, socially aware, culturally responsible roles. It started small, with a movie about women who could play baseball as well as any man, then the one about the gay man who was unjustly fired from his job, then the one about the band of duty-bound soldiers trying to save a US private named Ryan.

I find Hanks's filmmaking trajectory especially interesting because in literary terms, comedy is far more than just a story that makes you laugh. Northrop Frye, one of the 20th Century’s most respected literary critics, famously pointed out that what makes a story a comedy is the trajectory it follows, starting from a place of “old order”—structure and established tradition—descending into chaos where the old order is shaken, disrupted, and inverted—and emerging on the other side with a “new order” established, the old order subverted and done away with, and the new revealed to the great delight of all.

If Northrop Frye was on to anything with this general sketch of the comic archetype, it seems to me that Tom Hanks’ filmography follows something like a comic trajectory. It begins with the easy hedonism of the 80s—the “old order,” in which men and women had quite distinctly defined roles, so clearly defined that no one would hesitate to laugh at a joke about a man sexually mistreating a woman. In this “old order,” too, ethnic groups were easily slotted and categorized according to any number of unquestioned racial stereotypes and prejudices—so “easily,” in fact, that a film like Volunteers or The Bonfire of the Vanities could be made without anyone batting an eye.

Somewhere around the making of A League of Their Own, however, you see Hanks’s filmmaking descend into—not exactly comic chaos, necessarily, but certainly a chaotic exploration of these prejudices and assumptions, a shaking of this “old order” through a series of films that start to ask if there might be a different way to think about relationships between men and women, or people of different ethnic backgrounds, or sexual minorities.

Not that Tom Hanks’s films are marked by any distinct social consciousness. What I am describing, instead, is the growing social conscience of the culture beginning to seem into the movies he was making, as he started to take on more and more dramatic roles. Many of these later films still had strongly comic elements, certainly, but we begin to see a clear attempt to handle the comedy more responsibly, emerging in his films somewhere around 1993.

At the risk of reading far too much into the filmography of Tom Hanks, it makes me wonder what “new order” will emerge, in the coming years, from all the cultural questioning and political correcting we’ve seen over the last many decades. And if a new order does indeed emerge from chaos we’re going through, how will that, too, be reflected in the films of so prolific an actor as Tom Hanks (assuming, of course, that he is still making films when whatever it is we’re marching towards finally comes into view)?

I probably have read too much, here, into the lifework of an actor whose primary claim to fame, probably, is how truly innocuous his movies tend to be. However, at the risk of grossly over doing it, I will point out that Northrop Frye, the same critic who said that “real” comedy is about the trajectory from “old order,” through “chaos” to “new order,” he also suggested that the truest “comedy” we have is, in fact, the story told by the sacred book of the Christian faith: the Bible.

Because it describes an epic spiritual journey from an “old order” of sin and death and inevitable law, through a cross-shaped chaos to a new order—indeed, a new creation—on the other side, Frye suggested, the Bible may actually contain the most genuinely comic tale ever told.

If it's true, then perhaps Tom Hanks has unwittingly given us a small, imperfect analogy for the Good Book, in his own 4-decade-long journey from old to new order through a kind of filmmaking chaos.

In the Hands of Destiny: Spiritual Reflections on the Filmography of Tom Hanks (VI)

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One of the most intriguing movies I came across in my year-long journey through the complete filmography of Tom Hanks was 2012s Cloud Atlas. This surreal sci-fi thriller had somehow escaped my notice when it was first release over a decade ago, so I sat down to it last year with next to no expectations, save what I’d learned from the first few lines of the synopsis on Wikipedia: that it is an “epic science fiction film” with a story that “jumps between eras, spanning hundreds of years, until each storyline eventually resolves,” and that “writings from characters in prior storylines are found in future storylines,” and that “characters appear to recur in each era, but change relationships to each other.” 
I’d left off reading at that point, for fear of spoilers.

I’m not exactly sure what I had been expecting, I was completely caught off guard by the film's exquisitely structured and decidedly philosophical exploration of the interconnectedness of human life. From the harrowing journey of Adam Ewing, an American abolitionist in 1849, to the cloak-and-dagger exploits of an investigative journalist uncovering the corruption of Big Oil in 1970s San Francisco—from the poignant story of Robert Frobisher, a bisexual English composer creating his musical masterpiece in 1936, to the heartbreaking story of a humanoid clone named Somni-451, leading an uprising against her human over-lords in a dystopian Seoul, Korea in 2144—each story line is utterly distinct from one another in tone and tenor, and yet profoundly connected and intricately interwoven.

If you had the heart to trace the threads, for instance, you could see how Adam Ewing’s denouncement the 19th Century Slave Trade becomes a seed that will eventually bear the fruit of Somni-451’s revolution in Neo-Seoul, some 300 years later; or how the story of Zachry Bailey, who contacts an extraterrestrial civilization called the Prescients and so escapes a post-apocalyptic planet earth in 2321, has, as its historical impetus, the plaintive notes of Robert Frobisher’s 1936 magnum opus, “The Cloud Atlas Sextet,” which he composed almost 400 years earlier. As it weaves together these seemingly disparate stories, the film explores some profoundly metaphysical concepts, like the illusion of free will, the so-called “butterfly effect” of human action, the ephemeral nature of reality, and the meaning of history. There are even some mystical ideas with a distinctly eastern flavor, about the existence of the over-soul, the possibility of reincarnation, and the inexorable force of karma.

Although anyone of these ideas would bear a deeper discussion in a series about “spiritual reflections on the filmography of Tom Hanks,” what especially stood out to me in Cloud Atlas was the compelling questions it raises about the idea of destiny—the niggling sense we sometimes get that the course of our lives are actually being directed by forces beyond us, for purposes above us, and that the story we are living is really just a chapter in a much larger narrative that started long before us and won’t be complete until we’ve added our personal pages to the book. Whatever other questions Cloud Atlas may be asking, one of its core questions, it seems to me, is simply this: is there such a thing as “destiny” and, if so, how does it influence the course of individual lives?

Although it perhaps finds its most mystical expression in this film, the idea that one's life might be subject to the forces of "destiny" was a notion that had lingering in the background of a all sorts of Tom Hanks movies, long before Cloud Atlas hit the screen. Sleepless in Seattle wonders out loud, for instance, if there could be such a force pushing perfect strangers together until they become meant-to-be lovers. The characters in Forrest Gump find themselves unwittingly influencing the epoch-marking moments of American history in a way that could only be explained if there was some invisible hand directing them to do so. And in the final scene of Cast Away, Chuck Noland final delivers the FedEx package he had been carrying with him through his entire ordeal in a way that implies both that he was destined to receive the package and destined to deliver it when he was finally rescued.

If there were any connecting ligaments between all the movies in the Tom Hanks filmography, surely this question is one of them: Is destiny a thing, and do we, as individuals, have one?

As a Christian, I want to answer this question with a very qualified “yes”; certainly, the basic assumption of the Christian faith is that God is sovereign over his creation. Christians, of course, have arrived at a wide range of conclusions as to what God's “sovereignty” actually means, how to understand it, and how to explain it in relation to the many things that happen in the world that seem not to be God’s will. But even so, most Christians would agree in broad strokes with basic claim: that the Lord reigns (let the earth be glad). If God is sovereign, though, then in some sense we can say that he has a purpose for his Creation, and even for us his individual children. Each one of our days were written in his book, claims the Psalmist, before any of them came to be.

If there really is an unseen hand guiding the course of our lives, a Christian would say, the fingerprints of that hand must be those of the Lord God himself, and its shape is none other than the nail-pierced palm of His Son Jesus Christ.

I did, however, qualify my “yes" to the question posed by movies like Cloud Atlas. Because equally important to the biblical witness is the affirmation—a stunning affirmation, when you begin to delve its implications—that human beings actually have free will. Again: different Christians will explain this in different ways, and hold it in different kinds of tension with the Bible’s teaching on God’s sovereignty. But the idea that God created human beings with free will is embedded in the very first stories of the biblical text. Not for nothing was there a tree planted in the Garden that Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat from, and only because they had been created free did they choose to do so, having their eyes opened to the difference between good and evil.

If there is such a thing as destiny, then, the biblical witness does not portray it as some nameless, faceless, inexorable force, pushing us to conclusions we simply can’t avoid—ultimately, the view of destiny we find in the films of Tom Hanks is a rather pagan idea. In the Christian view, destiny is what happens when a personal, loving God works wisely and patiently with our decisions, and actions, and circumstances, moving our stories forward towards his good purposes, genuinely honoring the freedom he gave us when he brought us into the world, while still, mysteriously, and inexplicably, working all things together for the good of those who love him.

Ordinary People: Spiritual Reflections on the Filmography of Tom Hanks (V)

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One of my favorite books in the Old Testament is the Book of Ruth, that exquisite Hebrew short story tucked away between the Book of Judges and 1 Samuel. This may seem like an odd choice for me to place on a top ten list, given that more often than not Ruth is the focus of women’s Bible studies about the faithful heroines of the Bible, studies that are not primarily written with a 49-year-old male like me in mind. However, I had the opportunity to teach a Bible college course on the traditional “Five Scrolls,” the Megilloth of the Hebrew Bible (Song of Songs, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther and Ruth), and the time I spent in Ruth preparing for that study opened up this deceptively simple love story in ways I had never seen it before.

There are many reasons I’ve come to appreciate the Book of Ruth, but high among them all is the fact that the tale it tells is, in one sense, so very ordinary; one of the most ordinary stories in the Old Testament. There are no earth-moving miracles in Ruth, just supposedly “chance” encounters in unexpected places. There are no theophanic manifestations of the divine glory, just everyday people doing everyday things. There are no epic battles between opposing armies, no fascinating court intrigues, no feats of outrageous heroism or villainy.

The ordinariness of the book stands out all the more remarkably when you consider its place in the cannon. It comes right before 1 Samuel, with its glorious saga of David’s ascension to the throne, filled with prophetically summoned thunderstorms, stand-offs against giants, demonic soothsayers and more. Similarly, it comes just after the Judges, a book that lays out in graphic detail the unprecedented spiritual corruption of Israel in the days when they had no king and everyone did as they pleased. Like 1 Samuel, Judges has its fair share of miracles—divinely empowered strongmen, divinely wrought victories over heathen invaders, divinely orchestrated encounters with heavenly messengers, and so on.

In contrast to all this, however, in Ruth we have a faithful widow who sticks by her mother-in-law during a famine, who travels with her to the village of Bethlehem, who wins the heart of a well-off local farmer, who secures his hand in marriage, and who (as the dramatic conclusion to these exciting events) has a baby.

It’s barely dramatic enough to warrant a Hallmark Movie, though it is told with such theological sophistication that millennia of readers have been blessed and intrigued by it.

The book makes many important theological points, points about the sovereignty of God in the midst of loss and grief, points about the Lord’s hidden but inexorable work to bring Messiah into the world, points about the call to live obediently in step with Torah as a response to the widespread moral degeneracy and spiritual corruption of the world. There is one point that stands out among all these points, though, and artfully unifies them all: that God is powerfully present in the ordinary stuff of life. Everyday acts of living well, simple gestures of hospitality, commonplace encounters in ordinary places—these are often the circumstances where God is most vividly evident and most mysteriously at work.

This is a blog series on the filmography of Tom Hanks, though, not a post about Old Testament heroes of the Faith. The reason I’m unpacking this particular theme from Ruth, though—that God is often most evident in the most ordinary stuff of life—is because it brushes up against, and illuminates, a theme that I see often expressed in the films of Tom Hanks.

When you watch the actor’s whole life’s work, you begin to notice how ordinary so many of his characters are, or at least how everyday the circumstances are that begin their story, even if the story that unfolds in any particular film is far from ordinary, when it’s all said and done.

Joe vs. the Volcano starts with the phrase, “Once upon a time there was a guy named Joe, who had a very lousy job,” inviting viewers to understand that the film they are about to see is really just the story of an “ordinary Joe.”

In Saving Private Ryan, Captain Miller’s men have a running bet, trying to guess what Miller did as a civilian before the war. Given that he is a recipient of the congressional medal of honor, most assume he must have some dramatic back story—Reiben speculates that he was “assembled at O.C.S. out of spare body parts from dead G. I.s.” To their no small surprise, they find out towards the middle of the film that he was “nothing more” than an ordinary English Teacher from Addley, Pennsylvania.

In Cast Away, Chuck Noland is nothing but an ordinary FedEx systems analyst when his ordeal begins; in A Man Called Otto, the titular Otto is a merely a grumpy old man living in an ordinary gated community, who gets redeemed by the ordinary love of his neighbors; in Larry Crowne, the titular Crowne starts out his journey of personal rejuvenation as a fired Walmart employee.

Not that all of these films rank equally in caliber, of course. Joe vs. the Volcano was bizarre and Larry Crowne was mostly forgettable. What unites them, though, is the way they explore the great acts of charity, generosity, courage and resilience that ordinary people are capable of, and the oftentimes epic scope of the drama that can unfold from the centre of ordinary lives.

Tom Hanks plays his fair share of over-the-top heroes and villains, too, but one of the clearest messages I take from the totality of his films is that even the most ordinary of lives contains the stuff of epic drama. None of his films spend much time explicitly connecting this idea to anything particularly spiritual, of course, but it does not take a Christian pastor like me much effort to do so.

According to Jesus, the Kingdom of God is like tiny mustard seed planted in the earth, or a bit of yeast kneaded into dough; it's like farmers planting seed or fathers welcoming home their prodigal sons (and make no mistake, all these images would have seemed commonplace and everyday to Jesus’s First Century audience). But if it is like these things, then whatever else it is, the Kingdom of God must be something that thrives—throbs, even—in the ordinary circumstances of everyday life.

If you wanted one more parable to help you imagine what that looks like, you might consider the story of a lawyer being called on to defend a victim of unlawful dismissal (Philadelphia), the bereaved husband journeying with his son through their shared grief (Sleepless in Seattle), the inventive father trying to raise his autistic son (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), or any other one of Tom Hanks’ ordinary characters, who discover epic events unfolding in the midst of their everyday lives.

The Banality of Goodness: Spiritual Reflections on the Filmography of Tom Hanks (IV)

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In 1961, a court reporter named Hannah Arendt covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Eichmann, of course, was the Nazi official who organized the Final Solution—the state-sponsored, systematic genocide of the Jews in Nazi Germany. Decades after the war, the Israeli intelligence agency tracked him down in Argentina and brought him to Israel to stand trial for his crimes.

In her essay “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Hannah Arendt wrestles deeply with one of the primary questions to trouble the world in the aftermath of World War II—how was it possible for a country as civilized as Germany was in the 1930s to be responsible for so barbaric an atrocity as the Holocaust?

For instance, what stood out to Hannah Arendt at his trial was how “normal” he was; that is to say: he showed no special signs of hatred, or psychosis, or insanity. She points out that no less than six psychologists examined Eichmann, and they found no evidence of abnormal personality whatsoever. One doctor remarked that his “overall attitude towards people, especially his family and friends, was ‘highly desirable.’”

Hannah Arendt uses the term “the banality of evil” as a way of making sense of this incongruity—how a “normal, everyday guy” could be responsible for one of the most heinous crimes in all of history. The term, the “banality of evil” is her way of suggesting that that evil breeds in the everyday—in the normal—in the banal decisions we all make, or don’t make, all the time.

On his blog Experimental Theology, Richard Beck summarizes the point like this:
The argument Arendt makes ... is that evil isn't dark and deep but is, rather, thin and superficial. Evil is ordinary people thoughtlessly making a million small choices. ... The Holocaust couldn't have happened if people hadn't over time gradually consented to it, through seemingly insignificant daily choices. Laughing nervously, but without objection, to the anti-Semitic joke. Not shopping at the Jewish store. Accepting that promotion when the more qualified Jewish person was passed over. Casting a vote on election day. And so on.
I have wrestled with Arendt’s assessment of the “banality of evil” ever since I came across the concept, and from time to time I still wonder what normal, everyday activities I participate in, as a simple matter of course in a modern society, that history will look back on as evil.

The reason I’m mentioning “the banality of evil” here, in a blog series on the filmography of Tom Hanks, though, is because somewhere around the midpoint of my journey through the complete cinematographic works of Tom Hanks, I began to notice a theme that connected, in my mind, to Hannah Arendt’s work.

It was Tom Hanks penchant for playing ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and exploring the momentous consequences of their mundane decisions to “do the right thing.” I think I noticed it first in Sleepless in Seatle, where a grieving father is thrust into the very real drama of figuring out how he will parent his motherless son well in the midst of his own loneliness and longing (never mind that he ends up with Meg Ryan at the end of the film, the premise that this journey to magical romance started out with is, sadly, about as ordinary as they come).

That was just the tiny tip of an emerging iceberg, though, because shortly afterwards he played Andrew Beckett, the corporate lawyer in Philadelphia who sues his employer after he is fired for having AIDS. Although the legal drama the unfolds quickly leaves the realm of the ordinary, beneath the surface of the story lurk all sorts of questions about standing up for what’s right, even when it costs you, for choosing not to discriminate even though it’s easier to let stereotypes and prejudices do the thinking for you, and discovering the shared humanity in “the other.” These are, of course, ordinary decisions we are all faced with every day in our profoundly polarized world.

The iceberg came into clear focus in his next outing, though, because in 1994, he starred as Forrest Gump, the character that made Tom Hanks both a household name and a Hollywood A-lister. The story probably needs little re-cap, but just recall how Hanks’s portrayal of Forrest—who is, by his own admission, “not a smart man”—emphasizes simple things like commitment to ones friends, and devotion to one’s beloved, determined loyalty, artless honesty, simply “knowing what love is.” And then connect those mundane virtues to the epoch-making moments of American history that Forrest found himself thrust into, as a result of them.

If Hannah Arendt observed at Eichmann’s trial that incomprehensible evil emerges out of the ordinary, everyday decisions we make, all the time, that we won’t do the right thing, Tom Hanks’s films, it seems, offers the other side of that argument; that world-shaping goodness emerges out of all the ordinary moments we decide that we will.

Using Arendt’s language, we might say that the Tom Hanks filmography, taken as a whole, makes a case for the banality of goodness. Because after Forrest Gump, this theme becomes a bit of a central preoccupation in Hanks’s movies—the World War II sergeant who does his duty faithfully in Saving Private Ryan— the prison warden who treats an accused sex-offender kindly, in The Green Mile—the politician who decides to give up his life of philandering and take up the cause of the oppressed in Charlie Wilson’s War. There’s also Ben Bradlee’s intractable commitment to reporting the truth in The Post, and James Donovan’s determination to give a Soviet a fair trail, despite the cost to his reputation, in Bridge of Spies. And don’t get me started on Mr. Rogers.

Among other things, what binds all these characters together are the simple decisions they face to do right instead of wrong; though often they very quickly cease to be simple, these decisions bring into being a goodness that often grows to monumental proportions, with world-changing stakes.

This is a Christian assessment of Tom Hanks’s movies, of course, so, having pointed out the “banality of goodness,” that his work often illustrates, let me simply recall that Jesus himself taught something very similar—that the least would turn out, in the final analysis, to be the greatest, and the those who were faithful in the small things would be faithful in the big. Perhaps, among other things, our Lord had in mind the truth about the banality of goodness—that it thrived, actually, in the small, the mundane, the ordinary—when he said this.

A Humanist Portrait of the Heart: Spiritual Reflections on the Filmography of Tom Hanks (Part III)

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You don’t especially notice it when you’re just watching the odd film here and there, but when you try to watch the entire Tom Hanks filmography from beginning to end, like my wife and I did last year, you might notice, after a while, how distinctly godless his whole body of work actually is. This would stand out all the more markedly if, like me, you then wanted to write a blog series looking at his films from a theological perspective. Unlike the movies of Charleston Heston, for example, that were so often so explicitly religious (The Greatest Story Ever Told, The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur), or the movies of Jim Carey, let’s say, that often deal indirectly with very deep theological themes (Bruce Almighty, The Truman Show), God rarely figures, either as a character or a consideration, in most Tom Hanks movies.

There are a few exceptions to this rule. Certainly Forrest Gump is replete with theological themes, and The Green Mile can quite easily be read is some sort of a Christian allegory. There were one or two religious moments in Joe vs. the Volcano, to be sure, though these are largely forgotten; and in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood Hanks plays a bona fide Presbyterian minister, though the religious element in his portrayal of Mr. Roger’s story is distinctly muted. And anyways, these few films with expressly religious themes are quite overshadowed by his involvement with the Da Vinci Code movies, a trilogy of (mostly awful) movies that paint the story of the church with such bright swatches of cynicism, skepticism, an free historical invention, that it often borders on blasphemy and more than once crosses over the border completely.

So Tom Hanks, as an actor, seems not all that interested in exploring religious themes. This may not raise many eyebrows; neither does Sylvester Stallone or Tom Cruise, but you don’t see me blogging about them. What makes Hanks’s lack of interest in God of particular note, I think, is the fact that, in addition to his agnosticism, he has also earned the endearing reputation as one of Hollywood’s most wholesome actors.

He's often called “America’s Dad,” owing to the fact that his consistent portrayal of “genuine, honest characters” has “etched him into the heart” of the average American. Many even refer to him as an “everyman” actor—perhaps not realizing the irony that the phrase “everyman” was originally a religious term, used to describe a literary character who allegorically represents all of humanity in its relationship with the Divine. But if Hanks really is an American “everyman,” its especially notable how little relationship his films have, on the whole, with “the divine.”

Instead, what we find in Tom Hanks’s films is a general celebration of human goodness, things like honest grit, integrity no matter the cost, determination no matter the odds, a courageous sense of humor, self-made luck. While many Americans profess to being spiritual without being religious, Tom Hanks is, it would seem, religious without being spiritual. That is to say: he presents us with all the classic religious virtues—prudence, courage, temperance, and so on—without any of the traditional spiritual trappings—prayer, devotion to a higher power, self-sacrifice in service of the divine—that used to be understood as a clear path to their attainment.

This is not so much a critique as it is an observation. Religion does not de facto make a man good; history is stuffed with examples to prove that this is the case. However, it is interesting that in Tom Hanks’s characters, we see a wide range of virtues on display, with very little interest in wondering where they come from. It is assumed, I suppose, that they are simply there, present in the human heart; and provided one is willing to tap in to them, it seems, they can be accessed just as readily as their counterparts—cowardice, despair, decadence, and so on.

Or perhaps not quite as readily, necessarily. There is a reason Tom Hanks’s characters are so compelling, because they point us to something that we all hope is true but need some convincing to believe—that despite the great evidence to the contrary, the human heart is, at its core, bent towards good and tending towards great feats of quiet virtue.

On this point, a Christian assessment of the situation would be both in hearty agreement and also in vehement disagreement. Inasmuch as we believe that all human beings are truly made in the Image of God, it should not surprise us an iota whenever we glimpse reminders of the profound goodness of the human heart. At the same time, because we believe in the doctrine of original sin—the one doctrine, as Chesterton famously said, for which we have ample evidence—a robust Christian assessment of the idea that the human heart is inherently virtuous would also want to offer some very significant caveats. Yes, there is profound goodness woven into the fibre of the human soul, but let’s not forget how that same soul is curved in on itself. Short of a divine intervention, the highest virtues—especially faith, and hope, and love—can only, at best, be parodied, but never fully realized.

Perhaps it is too much to expect too theological an analysis of virtue in the films of a highly popular, widely beloved Hollywood actor, but for my part, the thing that makes Tom Hanks so compelling to watch on screen is the same thing that makes him so frustrating: his apparently naïve belief in a humanist vision of our inherent goodness. While I share the vision, I think, I find myself regularly wanting to ask him what he thinks it takes to realize it.

The Sum of a Life's Work: Spiritual Reflections on the Filmography of Tom Hanks (Part II)

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Approximately a year and a half ago, my wife and I started a little film-watching project, working our way through every single feature-length movie Tom Hanks has made in his 40 + years of acting. The fact that this project took us over a year and a half to complete, watching movies at the respectable rate of roughly one a week, illustrates on its own how extensive and prolific his career has been. Over the course of approximately 64 films, we saw comedies, dramas, biopics, adventure films and 3-D animated cartoons. Along the way we saw at least one film in pretty much every definable genre, from westerns (News of the World) to science fiction (Finch), from gangster films (Road to Perdition), to legal dramas (Philadelphia), to war movies (Saving Private Ryan) and more.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am planning, over the next few months, to offer some spiritual reflections on the full filmography of Tom Hanks, as viewed through the lens of a Christian theology. And one of the first things that stands out when you start to think theologically about the movies of Tom Hanks is just how big and diverse a body of work they comprise. He is widely recognized as one of Hollywood’s most prolific actors, and the recognition is well-earned.

It’s not just the quantity of films, either, but also the wide range of quality. In the last year and a half, my wife and I saw some of the most poignant performances captured on film, and also some of the worst. That two of my favorite films of all time (Forrest Gump, Joe vs. the Volcano), and two of the awfullest movies I’ve ever seen (The Da Vinci Code, Volunteers) all starred the same actor says a lot about the range of this particular actor’s career. My strong impression is that, after he reached the point where in his fame where he could easily weather a flop, he started choosing his scripts based on his own personal interest in the story or the character, whether or not the project had all the ingredients of a hit. This has led to some fascinating gems that might otherwise not have been made, but also some nearly unwatchable movies.

As a small life lesson, the full Tom Hanks filmography illustrates how the whole of a person’s life is always greater than the sum of its individual parts. If the value of Tom Hanks’s career were calculated as a simple equation of “hits” minus “bombs,” it’s quite possible he might only break even (I’ve not done the math, but my strong hunch is that there is an equal representation of both on the list of his acting credits). Yet, when viewed as a whole, there is something about the full body of the man’s life work that transcends each individual success or failure.

Because his life’s work has been so well-captured on film, of course, it’s easier to notice this “something bigger” that emerges from the whole, but once you’ve seen, it encourages you to consider your own life’s work in a similar light. It can be tempting to dwell on either the successes and failures of life as though each one defines us or determines our worth on its own. One of the things you realize when you watch the full career of a prolific actor like Tom Hanks, however, is that the meaning of a life never really boils down to a single achievement or failure. The meaning of our lives, rather, emerges out of the entirety of our efforts—the good and the bad—and as such it transcends every individual homerun or strikeout.

On its own this observation is wise, maybe, but not profoundly spiritual, or explicitly Christian. It becomes so, however, when you connect it to Christian concepts like grace and discipleship, holiness and forgiveness. Because the Christian life places such a strong emphasis on living in obedience to the teachings of Jesus (Matt 28:20), working out our salvation with fear and trembling (Phil 2:12), and having a righteousness that surpasses the Pharisees (Matt 5:20), it can be tempting to assume that our lives as disciples of Jesus can be evaluated in simple terms of our moral successes weighed against our moral failings. It’s equally easy to suppose that those individual “works”—for the good or the bad—in some way define us as either a success or a failure, spiritually speaking.

But if the life’s work of an actor with the scope and range of a Tom Hanks is greater than the sum of its individual films, this is infinitely truer for the life’s work of a sincere follower of Jesus Christ, someone seeking authentically to live their lives in his footsteps. When viewed though the lens of God’s grace, the meaning and the value of our lives as disciples emerges as a whole that beautifully transcends the individual steps forward or backward we may make in seeking to follow Him. And only God himself knows what will be revealed in the end, when the full filmography of our lives is viewed in its entirety, and we stand before him to receive our reward.

You Never Know What You’re Gonna Get: Christian Reflections on the Filmography of Tom Hanks (I)

Some time in the spring of 2022, I happened to catch an interview with Tom Hanks on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. They were talking about his latest film at the time, the musical bio-pic Elvis, and at one point Colbert referred to him as “America’s Movie Dad.” The description struck me as poignantly true, and it flashed me back to one of my earliest experiences watching a “grown-up” movie as a child: his 1984 romantic comedy with Daryl Hannah, Splash.

It occurred to me that nearly as long as I have been watching movies, Tom Hanks has been starring in them. I was born in 1974; Tom Hank’s first cinematic appearance was a bit role in a 1980 slasher flick called He Knows You’re Alone. Many of my favorite films of all time are Tom Hanks outings, including Joe vs. the Volcano, Forrest Gump, and The Green Mile. I remember watching Big with my cousins when we were nearly the same age as the protagonist in the story; and I remember watching The Man with One Red Shoe with my parents when I was much too young for it (I never did get to see the end, because they shut it off part way through).

So I have to agree with Stephen Colbert on this one. If any one deserves to be called my “Movie Dad,” it’s probably Tom Hanks, who has more or less been with me since childhood.

It inspired me, somewhat impulsively, to set a goal to see if I couldn’t watch every single movie Tom Hanks ever made. Looking up the entire list on Wikipedia, I discovered that—not counting cameos and Toy Story spin-off cartoons—the entire Tom Hanks filmography includes no less than 64 films, spanning a full 40 decades. I invited my wife to join me, and sometime around the end of June, 2022, we started, working our way through the list, more-or-less in chronological order, watching roughly one film a week.

A few weeks ago, about a year and a half later, we watched the final film on the list (it was Elvis for us, but only because we'd watched Asteroid City out of order). We were amazed to discover the breadth and depth of his acting career. There were some pretty deep cuts on the list that we’d never even knew existed; but there were also some classics that, coming back to them after a few decades since first seeing them, took on new light and deeper meaning than we’d ever seen in them before.

Part way through the project, I started to notice some running themes and consistent motifs in Tom Hanks’ acting career that seemed to intersect in curious ways with Christian spirituality and theology. Not that any of his movies were explicitly, or even allusively Christian. One of the curious things in the full Tom Hanks filmography is how seldom anyone thinks much at all about God. Instead, what I found in Tom Hanks were hazy hints at powerful ideas that a robust Christian understanding of the world would want to reply to with a, “Yes, and….”

For me, the Tom Hanks filmography was like a huge, unfinished connect the dots of concepts and intuitions. On its own, it seems somewhat scattered, but my own faith allowed me to connect these dots in ways that formed a fascinating picture of profound spiritual significance.

All of this is by way of introduction to a new series I’m planning for the next few weeks here at terra incognita, which I’m calling “You Never Know What You’re Gonna Get: Christian Reflections on the Filmography of Tom Hanks.” My goal is to spend some time reflecting deeply on the movies of Tom Hanks and seeing what theological themes emerge.

We’ll get started doing that in earnest in the days to come, but for today, let me answer the most common question I got asked when people heard I was working my way through the entire filmography of Tom Hanks: which movie is your favorite?

It’s actually a bit difficult to answer that question succinctly, since, as I said above, the full list includes no less than 64 films; so instead of naming a single movie, let me offer here, in closing, a few top-ten lists of best and worst Tom Hanks performances.

Top Ten Favorite Tom Hanks Performances
1. Forrest Gump
2. The Green Mile
3. Greyhound
4. Catch Me if You Can
5. Castaway
6. Cloud Atlas
7. News of the World
8. Philadelphia
9. Saving Private Ryan
10. Captain Phillips

Top Ten “Diamonds in the Rough”
1. Punchline
2. Every Time We Say Goodbye
3. Joe vs. the Volcano
4. A Hologram for the King
5. The Post
6. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
7. Nothing in Common
8. The Terminal
9. A League of Their Own
10. Bridge of Spies

Top Ten Worst Tom Hanks Films
1. Bachelor Party
2. Volunteers
3. The Ladykillers
4. The Da Vinci Code
5. Larry Crowne
6. The Circle
7. The Man with One Red Shoe
8. Pinocchio
9. Bonfire of the Vanities
10. Toy Story 4

A Fresh Look at Cross-Dressing in Deuteronomy

A few years ago I was speaking with a colleague in ministry about how the church responds to trans people. I tried to suggest that, strictly speaking, as a question of chapter-and-verse citation, the Bible does not say anything about the morality of gender transitioning, and, therefore, it is probably best for the church not to frame it as a moral issue.

My friend cocked an eyebrow. “Really?” he said. “You don’t think the Bible addresses this?” And then he cited Deuteronomy 22:5—“A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this”—and he rested his case.

At the time, I hadn’t spent a great deal of time digging into Deuteronomy 22:5, so I didn’t argue the point. I was pretty sure, however, that a single verse in Torah hardly made an airtight argument. I felt this especially because Christians believe as a foundation of their faith that the Lord Jesus has fulfilled all of Torah in his death and resurrection, and the single command to love our neighbours faithfully in Jesus Christ fulfills the entirety of Torah (Galatians 5:14).

A while later, though, I had occasion to look more closely at the Hebrew text of Deuteronomy 22:5, and I noticed something I had never considered before.

You see: the most common word for “clothing” in the Hebrew Bible is beged. It comes from the Hebrew root word bâgad, “to cover,” and occurs 217 times in the Hebrew Bible. Other common words for clothing include lebûsh (32 occurrences), malbûsh (8 occurrences), śimlâh (29 occurrences) and mekasseh (4 occurrences).

In contrast to this, the word “kelı̂y” (319 occurrences) is a somewhat flexible word, which generally means something like “equipment” or “furnishings.” It can refer to a vessel or sack that contains something, to jewelry, to a tool or weapon, to gear that someone might wear for a specific purpose, or to a soldier’s armour. The meaning of kelı̂y is very much dependent on the context in which it is being used.

The most common word for “a man,” in Hebrew is the noun 'ı̂ysh. It occurs 2163 times and means “a man” in the most general sense. The second most common word for “a man,” is the word 'âdâm, with 541 occurrences. This is the word that the name “Adam” comes from and can mean a “man” specifically, or a human being more generally (regardless of gender, as in “God created 'man' in his image”). The Hebrew word for “male,” with special reference to the sexed-body, is zâkâr (with 82 occurrences).

In contrast to these various terms for a “man,” the word geber literally means something like “valiant man,” or, more loosely, a “warrior.” It occurs 65 times in the Hebrew Bible.

With that rough and ready Hebrew glossary in mind, let me return to Deuteronomy 22:5, and its prohibition, seemingly, against men and women wearing each other’s clothing. Because the word it uses for “man” is not 'ı̂ysh, or 'âdâm, or zâkâr. And neither is the word for the man’s clothing beged, lebûsh, or śimlâh. The word the NIV translates as “man” is geber, “a mighty man,” and the word the NIV translates as “clothing” is kelı̂y, “gear/equipment.” Admittedly, the word geber can be used in the Hebrew Bible to describe a man generally, in a way similar to how the word 'ı̂ysh is used, but in this context, paired with the word kelı̂y like this, it seems obvious to me that simple, generic “cross dressing” is not what the verse has in mind.

Literally, we might render it like this: “There shall not be ‘the gear’ of a ‘valiant man’ upon a woman, and a ‘valiant man’ shall not put on the mantle (simlat) of a woman.”

A rough and ready gloss of the verse might run like this: “A woman shall not put on the equipment of a warrior, and a warrior shall not put on a woman’s dress.”

It would take more unpacking than I have space for in a simple blog post like this to determine how accurate this gloss is to the original intent. It’s notable to me, however, that the prohibition against a woman “wearing a warrior’s arms” appears in Chapter 22, shortly after a lengthy list of laws pertaining to how the Israelites are to wage war (or not to wage war, as the case may be) with the nations they will encounter in the Promised Land. Verses 21:10-14, for instance, give careful guidelines for how the Israelites are to treat a woman taken captive in war.

With this context in mind, I can’t help but wonder if Deuteronomy 22:5 actually has nothing to do with the act of cross-dressing, but instead is prohibiting the people of Israel from using their women as soldiers in battle, or allowing their male soldiers to shirk their “manly” duty to fight on behalf of their people (both of which, in an Ancient Near Eastern context, would be an affront to the nation's honor (see, for instance, Judges 4:9)).

Even if these arguments aren’t conclusive, they strongly suggest that we cannot read Deuteronomy 22:5 as some sort of a definitive word on the modern day phenomenon of gender dysphoria, or use it as a some kind of directive on how we ought to respond to trans people. If we do, we'll be doing a kind of violence to the text (to say nothing of what it does to trans people themselves), wrenching the verse from its context and making it say something it’s not meaning to say.

A Fresh Look at the Prophet Daniel

Last week I shared some thoughts about an often-overlooked detail in the story of the Road to Emmaus, and the possibility that, counter to generations of tradition, the two disciples that Jesus encountered that day might not both have been male, that they might have been a married couple. That post received an unexpected level of engagement at my church, so much so that I thought I’d share another “overlooked detail” that I came across in my daily Bible reading, that maybe sheds some interesting light on an familiar story.

The story in question involves the prophet Daniel, one of the best loved prophets in the Old Testament. Many of us have probably heard the stories of Daniel interpreting King Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams, or reading the writing on the wall, or braving the lion’s den, but the other day I was reading Daniel Chapter 1 and I saw something I never noticed before.

In verse 1:3, we are told that Daniel was brought to Babylon from Jerusalem during the exile, and that upon arriving in the palace he was placed in the custody of Ashpenaz, the chief of Nebuchadnezzar’s court officials. That is how the NIV renders the verse, anyways. The NASB reads the same, though it includes a footnote clarifying that the word could be translated as the “chief of the king’s eunuchs.” This is, incidentally, how the old King James version translates it.

Was Ashpenaz actually the chief of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace eunuchs? If so, what would that have meant for Daniel, to have been placed in Ashpenaz’s custody?

The word in question is sârı̂ys, a Hebrew word that comes from a root word that literally means “to castrate.” It’s the word used in Esther 2:14 to describe Shaashgaz, for example, who was the eunuch in charge of the King’s harem, and certainly in the context of that story—which shares many similarities with Daniel, by the way—in that story it is highly probable that Shaashgaz, as the keeper of the king’s harem, was a eunuch in the literal sense of the word.

The word sârı̂ys can also simply mean an “official” or “officer of the court,” however, with no implications as to the person’s reproductive status. In the story of Joseph and Potiphar, for example, we’re told that Potiphar was a sârı̂ys of Pharaoh, and later we discover that he is married, and may even have had a daughter (Gen 41:45). In that story, it’s not likely that Potiphar was a eunuch in the technical sense, which is why most English translations call him an “official” in Pharoah’s court.

In some cases, as in the story of Esther above, the context itself can help us decide how the word is being used. We know, for example, that in 2 Kings 20:18, when the Jewish King Hezekiah sins by showing off his wealth and military might to the envoys from Babylon, the prophet Isaiah warns him that, as a result, his children will be taken away and made to be sârı̂yim in the palace of the Babylonian king. Given the severity of this threat, the context suggests that Babylon will “make eunuchs” of Hezekiah’s sons in the literal sense, not simply make them into court officials. It is possible that this was a common practice—or at least, not uncommon—for Babylon to castrate its prisoners of war before making them servants of the court.

So what about Daniel? Does the term sârı̂ys in this story mean more than just “an official?” Was Daniel literally “made into a eunuch” when he came to serve under Ashpenaz, the head of the king's eunuchs?

Admittedly, the final answer is inconclusive (hence the NASB’s footnote leaving both possibilities), but my hunch, for what it’s worth, is that he was.

I say this partly because of the similarities between the story of Daniel and the story of Esther, another Jewish captive who experienced sexual violence at the hands of the Persian court (though admittedly Esther’s sexual violence was of a different nature). I also say it because of the way 2 Kings 20:18 seems to foreshadow Daniel’s situation so directly.

It would be easy to make a much bigger deal out this detail than the context warrants; Daniel being “made a eunuch” does not make his situation the same as people who identify as what now adays we might call a “sexual minority.” At least, not exactly the same. If Daniel was a eunuch, it was not sex-change surgery he received. He was violently mutilated by an oppressive empire. It would be anachronistic, I think, to over-lay his story onto the experience of people today who identify as trans, or experience gender dysphoria.

At the same time, it would be easy to make too small a deal out of this detail, too; and that, I think, is the greater danger. In Deuteronomy 23:1, we’re told quite explicitly that no one who has been castrated is to be permitted in the assembly of God’s people. It’s not clear what should be done with them, but it’s clear they are to be “excluded from the assembly.” And yet, if my reading of Daniel’s story is accurate, then in Daniel we have at least one instance of someone who falls under the Deuteronomy 23 prohibition, but instead of being excluded he is, rather, used powerfully by God.

There’s a line in Daniel 10:11 that I’ve always found to be very poignant. Daniel has received a horrific vision of the future and is in deep distress. He’s been praying and mourning for three days straight, when a divine visitor finally comes to comfort him with the interpretation of what he’s seen. Before this theophanic messenger does that, however, he starts by saying: “You, Daniel, are ‘highly esteemed.’”

That’s how the NIV renders it, at least, but I don’t think it’s strong enough. In Hebrew the word is châmad, a word that literally means “desirable,” or “precious.” It’s the word used to describe precious jewels in 2 Chronicles 20:25, precious gold in Ezra 8:27. In Psalm 19:9-10 it’s the word used to describe “the judgements of the Lord”—they are more desirable (châmad) than precious gold.

The use of this word to describe Daniel in 10:11 would hit you in the gut with its beauty, if, in Daniel 1:3, it really was the case that he had been castrated when he was brought into the service of King Nebuchadnezzar. Because if he was, then according to the Law of Moses, his status as someone whose body lacked “full sexual congruity with his gender,” so to speak, would mean that he should have been excluded from the community, cut off from life with God (no pun intended).

And yet, Daniel discovers just exactly the opposite: his divine messenger assures him that he is deeply loved—desirable even, and precious—regardless any sexual violence he may have experienced at the hands of the oppressor, and whether or not his body was “sexually whole” (for lack of a better way of saying it). Those things would not determine his worth in God’s eyes, or, more importantly, his desirability as a servant of the Lord.

Neither do they determine our worth in God’s eyes, if we are in circumstances similar to Daniel’s: if we have experienced sexual violence, perhaps, that has left a permanent scar on us, if our bodies do not align wholly with our sense of who we are, if there is something about our bodies that feels to us “un-whole,” and we think, as a result, there’s no place for us in community. If I’m on to anything in my reading of Daniel’s story, none of those things make us any less precious to God, or God less able to use us powerfully for his purposes.

A Fresh Look at the Road to Emmaus

In Luke 24:13-32, we’re told about a mysterious encounter two disciples had with the risen Jesus, in the afternoon on the day of his resurrection. It’s sometimes called “The Emmaus Road Encounter,” because these two disciples encounter him while they’re on their way to Emmaus, a small village about seven miles outside of Jerusalem. At first they don’t know it’s him, and the text strongly implies that somehow or other they are being supernaturally prevented from recognizing him. They start sharing with him the bewildering story they'd heard that morning, about an empty tomb and a risen Lord, and he explains to them how it had all been predicted in the Old Testament Scriptures. When they finally reach their destination, and he joins them for dinner, we’re told that they suddenly recognize him “in the breaking of the bread.” The instant it dawns on them who they’ve been talking to, however, he vanishes, leaving them with racing thoughts and burning hearts.

It’s a great story, one of the most famous post-resurrection encounters in the New Testament. One Easter I was researching it for a sermon, however, when, like the disciples recognizing Jesus in the breaking of the bread, I came across some details that helped me recognize someone in the story I'd never seen before.
 
You see: every illustration of the road to Emmaus I’ve ever seen has always been roughly the same. Two men are seen, walking along an idyllic country road, with a mysterious stranger (usually in white) walking between them. I’ve sprinkled a few samples throughout this post to help you imagine it.

The details may vary somewhat from picture to picture, but, in addition to the presence of the mysterious stranger, there’s one detail they all share in common. The two disciples are always both depicted as being male. I’ve never seen a painting of the Emmaus Road Encounter that bucks this trend: a mysterious Jesus walking along the road with two men.

Now, this post is primarily an exegetical reflection, not an advocacy piece, but let me humbly point out that there is nothing in the text that would require both disciples to be male, and there are, actually, strong exegetical reasons to suspect that one of the two was, in fact, female.

Certainly, one of them is quite clearly male. We’re told he’s named Cleopas, and he seems to be doing most of the talking. The other disciple remains unnamed throughout the encounter, and, though he or she may have spoken at some point, the narrative uses a plural verb, “they said,” to describe it; that is to say, it only describes the second disciple speaking with Cleopas together, so we don't have any specific personal pronouns we can use to determine his or her gender. 


All we know that he or she was traveling with someone named Cleopas, and they apparently lived together; at least, they’re staying at the same house when they arrive at Emmaus.

This details stands out pretty markedly when you go looking elsewhere in the New Testament for evidence of who this Cleopas might have been, and who might have been living with him in Emmaus.

In John 19:25, we’re told that when Jesus was crucified, a woman named Mary, was standing at his cross, along with Jesus’s mother, Jesus’s aunt, and Mary Magdalene. This fourth woman, we’re told, was “Mary the wife of Clopas.”

Could that Mary, the wife of a man named Clopas, be the same disciple in Luke 24:13, walking along the road with a man named Cleopas? 

Before you answer, I should point out that: (a) both names are a variation on the Greek name Cleopater; (b) some ancient manuscripts spell the name in John 19:25 as Cleophas; and (c) at least some Christian traditions hold that they are the same person.

Of course, if the Cleopas that Jesus met on the road to Emmaus really was the same Clopas mentioned in John 19:25, whose wife was standing at the cross when the Lord died, then it doesn’t take much to connect the dots. It’s very likely, and certainly not impossible, that the second disciple on the road to Emmaus was a woman, Clopas’s wife, herself a devoted follower of Jesus Christ.

Even if these exegetical arguments don’t satisfy, it does raise some crucial questions: why do we always assume that the unnamed disciple in the story was male, when there’s nothing in the text itself to justify that assumption?

And what does it say about us and our biases when reading Scripture, our tendency to project onto the text what we assume is there, instead of opening ourselves to see what’s really there?

And what else might we be missing in our reading of the Scripture—who else might we be excluding from the story—because our cultural biases, our complacency with tradition, and/or our spiritual prejudices have blinded us to their presence?