ANTAKALIPA

Silence (2016): Faith at the Edge of God’s Absence What happens when belief costs everything—and God does not answer? Martin Scorsese’s Silence is not a story about martyrdom. It is a story about betrayal —and whether betrayal can coexist with faith. It is not a film about religious triumph. It is a meditation on the terror of unanswered prayer . Unlike conventional narratives of belief, Silence does not reassure. It wounds. At its center stands Father Sebastião Rodrigues, a Jesuit priest whose faith is not tested by temptation, comfort, or doubt—but by the suffering of others and the deafening quiet of God. This is a film where God does not speak. And where that silence becomes the central theological problem. I. The God Who Does Not Answer From the opening frames, Silence establishes its governing question: What if God does not intervene? The Japanese Christians are tortured not for renouncing belief privately, but for refusing to trample on the fumie —the...

Meursault, the Sun, and the Crime of Indifference Alienation, Absurdity, and Moral Judgment in Albert Camus’s The Stranger Albert Camus’s The Stranger is one of the most unsettling novels of the twentieth century, not because of what its protagonist does, but because of what he refuses to do. Meursault does not grieve properly, does not lie convincingly, does not explain himself, and above all, does not pretend that life has an inherent meaning. For this, he is judged more harshly than for murder. In The Stranger, Camus stages a quiet but devastating trial—not only of Meursault, but of society itself, exposing how moral systems rely less on justice than on emotional conformity. At its core, The Stranger is a novel about the crime of indifference. Meursault’s failure is not ethical in the traditional sense; it is existential. He does not deny morality—he simply experiences the world without illusion. In doing so, he becomes intolerable to a society that demands performance, ...