With the Infinite: 'Conversations on Faith'

I found the small hardcover book in the "Spirituality" section; it's a place my atheist butt usually avoids. Conversations on Faith, however, is a discussion between Father Antonio Spadaro and director Martin Scorsese, and as such it caught my eye. Cautiously, I participate in capitalism and leave the bookstore with the book.

"we dwell in eternity" – Martin Scorsese, Conversations on Faith

I think often of Harvey Keitel in Mean Streets telling the audience "you don't fuck around with the infinite." (The quote appears as an epigraph in Stephen King's IT, which is where it first stuck in my mind at a young age.) Agnostically, this is a factual statement and maybe the defining line of Scorsese's body of work. You absolutely do not fuck around with the infinite.

Scorsese's discussions with Spadaro are quite lovely. In a world awash in christofascism and pushy, bigoted religious zealotry, the two men engage in a thoughtful back and forth that is non-dictatorial and non-judgmental. The book is less a sermon than a truthful, honest discussion of how Scorsese's approaches to faith, religion, and morality have informed the director's film career for decades.

Cinephiles will find a lot in the pages of Conversations on Faith, whether that's Scorsese's reflections on his biography and filmography or his reactions to films by Rossellini, Bresson, and Pasolini. In the final pages, the book reproduces a short script by Scorsese that answers Pope Francis' appeal for artistic representations of Jesus. Scorsese turns the prompt into a self-reflection and a question rather than an answer.

Scorsese and Spadaro's book offers an alternative to prescriptive visions of faith and religion. For atheist me, their discussion plays out like poetry, and no one is trying to dictate people's lives because of something Walt Whitman wrote.