Introduction: What Kind of Faith? On Christian Spiritual Life and the Message of Silence

The dossier examines the ways in which spiritual life can be communicated through literary and cinematic expression. The dossier emerged from work with three outstanding students—Elijah Young, Alison Parmenter, and Costanza Chirdo—taking the class on the final-year undergraduate course Studies in Literature and Film which I taught at the Department of English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. By looking at one shared source text the aim is to study, compare, and reveal the ways in which literature and film can serve as unique artistic forms for communicating about faith and the significance of confronting silence as a way to building one’s relationship with God and our fellow human beings. The text in question is the Japanese novel Silence by Shūsaku Endō, and its two eponymous film adaptations, by Masahiro Shinoda and Martin Scorsese, respectively. It is through a comparative study of the texts that we can get the “full picture” of the message of Silence and better understand how each author (or auteur!) adds meaningful depth to the source material’s depiction of the Christian spiritual life.