Is this a film aimed at helping audiences find God? “It wouldn’t be that easy,” says director Ang Lee. “You have to go through suffering and pain. You have to be in awe. You have to go through tests to believe in God—or not believe in God, in some cases.”

He is a Catholic deacon as well as a professor of English and creative writing, and his many novels come face to face with “the imponderables of life.”

It's Oscar time, and as the Academy Awards are handed out this weekend, revisit our archive of interviews and stories about such recent films as The Tree of Life, Higher Ground, The Way, and more.

Director Terrence Malick’s new movie is a meditation on traditional Christian questions about evil, suffering, grace, and beauty, says Calvin College professor of English Roy Anker.

Actor Martin Sheen says walking the Camino de Santiago is “a journey of the spirit as well as the flesh” and a search for ritual as well as transcendence.

Actress Vera Farmiga plays a woman who is “wrestling with the Lord and refusing to let him go until she understands and until he blesses her,” says writer and author Frederica Mathewes-Green.

The annual New York Jewish Film Festival showed a selection of films that "ask hard questions about life, culture, identity, and politics," according to Richard Pena, the Film Society of Lincoln Center's program director and a member of the festival's selection committee.

"The Simpsons is not a show about religion, but it’s about a family in which religion plays a part, and in that sense it’s really reflective of what most Americans do and feel about religion," says Mark Pinsky, author of "The Gospel According to The Simpsons."

There's been a growing wave of religious controversy since Dan Brown's novel, THE DA VINCI CODE, was first released in 2003. Many Christians were deeply offended by the story's portrayal of Jesus, Christian doctrine and church history. Now, the highly anticipated movie version is intensifying those debates.

Kim Lawton sat down with prominent author and Episcopal priest Fleming Rutledge to reflect on the Easter story of crucifixion and resurrection.