Fourteen minutes into the new film Collision, my fingers started to itch for the fast-forward button. I desperately scanned the movie’s press materials: “How long can this go on?” I wondered. (Answer: 90 minutes.) The documentary, which opens this week, shows the public intellectual Christopher Hitchens and an Idaho pastor named Douglas Wilson arguing in one drab venue after another over whether Christianity is “good for the world.” So uncinematic is this picture—two middle-aged white men talking—that my attention insistently wandered toward anything humanizing and finally dwelled, for too long perhaps, on a fleck of something on Hitchens’s eyelash. All the while Hitchens and Wilson went on and on and on and on, always well mannered, never conceding a thing.
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For those of us who wrestle with the question of religion and morality, your column was brilliant. In particular, the flexible litmus test you set out in the last paragraph ought to be the centerpiece of any such discussion and will forever be my roadmap. Thank you so much!!