Roger Ebert's Religion
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/s-brent-plate/roger-eberts-religion_b_3018344.htmlS. Brent Plate
Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Hamilton College
Posted: 04/05/2013 9:03 am
His mother prayed he'd become a priest, but he questioned the catechism of his Catholic school. Years later, encounters with Ingmar Bergman rekindled his childhood theological tussles, and he found a kinship with the great Swedish director's own wrestling with Christianity. Years later still, in and out of hospitals and treatments for thyroid cancer, his beloved wife Chaz held his hand and recited Psalm 23 and the Lord's Prayer to him.
Roger Ebert was explicit about his lack of religious commitment. In his 2011 memoir Life Itself, he comes clean: "No, I am not a Buddhist. I am not a believer, not an atheist, not an agnostic. I am more content with questions than answers." In so doing, he inadvertently expressed just how much of a religious person he was. As the astute Catholic monk Thomas Merton once declared, "A man is known better by his questions than his answers," and indeed religious traditions themselves unfold in the oscillation between questions and answers, answers and questions. There is no great person of faith, be it Abraham or Moses, St Augustine or St John of the Cross, Jesus or Muhammad, who did not express doubt, did not ask a lot of questions.
Ebert's questioning revealed for him the human and ethical aspects of religious traditions, and he realized how Catholicism made him into a humanist before he even knew what humanism was. In an interview posted on Flavorwire in 2011 he stated, "I believe my social conscience and my liberalism were founded on the teachings of Jesus." Through it all he was as anxious about the absolutes of atheism as the certainty of the pious, suggesting, "Those who say that 'believer' and 'atheist' are concrete categories do violence to the mystery we must be humble enough to confess."
In this he was the best kind of writer about religious matters, the kind that rationally appreciated the need for the imagination and that imaginatively reconceived reasonable thinking. In film, he was attracted to mystics like Werner Herzog and the Catholic guilt of Martin Scorsese; in literary measures to the interrogative inquisitiveness of Studs Terkel.
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honors late film critic Roger Ebert.
Excerpts from column by Mark Caro, Chicago Tribune reporter, April 8, 2013:
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T)he Rev. Michael Pfleger, (who) ended the service by saying, "The balconies of heaven are filled with angels saying, "Thumbs up."
"The Rev. John F. Costello invoked the film "The Hours" and its observations on lives cut short as he discussed how Ebert, raised Catholic in Urbana, wrestled with "the mystery of faith" not as someone who rejected God but rather someone forever seeking further understanding."
"I wanted to dispel the notion that he was an agnostic," Costello said after the service. "He was a believer."
The gatherers were reminded often of Ebert's love of laughter, but this was a solemn affair, as befitting a 90-minute Catholic mass.
