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Sarah Masters reviews the film

What Do You Believe? Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers

This highly acclaimed documentary is an excellent resource for chaplains who wish to address and promote tolerance and religious diversity among teenagers. Compelling in-depth portraits of teens of various faiths, all with poignant stories about their beliefs, are interspersed with lively commentary from other teenage believers, agnostics, and atheists. What Do You Believe? provides much insight into current beliefs held by this age group.

The articulate teenagers chosen are diverse and delightful and the viewer gains a broad picture of the religious and spiritual lives of American youth. You hear from a Catholic, a Muslim, a Sikh, an African-American Jew, a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Christian Evangelist, a Pagan, a Native American, and many others, each willing to share their innermost thoughts and feelings about the meaning of life, ethical behavior, suffering, death and prayer.

Consider the comments about the act of prayer, among them: “I pray to surrender.” “I pray when I get scared.” “I don’t know how to.” “Prayer doesn’t seem to have much purpose.” “I pray most about girls.” “It’s about yourself. Making yourself better.” “God doesn’t want you wasting your time worshipping in prayer. He wants you to get out there and do something good.”

What Do You Believe? is not yet available for purchase on home video but you can rent the film from the distributor listed below.

Completed: 2002
Running Time: 50 Minutes
Producer/Director: Sarah Feinbloom

If you are interested in renting this film, you can do so at www.newday.com. The cost of rental is $79.00/DVD because the film is still in educational distribution.

Sarah Masters is the Managing Director of the Hartley Film Foundation, a non-profit foundation dedicated to cultivation, support, production and distribution of the best documentaries and audio meditations on world religions, spirituality, ethics and well-being.

Book Review

Chaplain Kenneth L. Nolen, D. Min., reviews

What Can I Do: Ideas to Help Those Who Have Experienced Loss

“At last, I am healed enough to be able to share with you so that you can help begin the long healing process for others,” Barbara Glanz writes in the preface of her insightful and practical book. Although this is not a textbook on death and dying, Glanz addresses topics explored by scholars in the field of thanatalogy while providing heartfelt and heart-tugging stories from real people experiencing different kinds and levels of grief.

She provides sensible down-to-earth advice on how to address the needs of the grieving. Her personal grief experiences provide her with the understanding and depth of compassion that add validity to her narratives. Although Glanz writes that “grieving is a world that none of us wants to enter,” she bravely relates her own grief experiences and experiences of others that reveal approaches that help and are not so helpful for the grieving.

Some of the advice found in What Can I Do is based on well-known practical principles. Because of its simplicity, advice such as, “… silence can truly be golden. It is often more important to be concerned with what you don’t say than with what you do say. Simply a hug or touching a hand is often the best gift we can give,” needs to be repeatedly emphasized. Other suggestions such as, “It is perfectly okay and healing to have uproarious times of laughter mingled with the tears,” may be new to some readers.

What Can I Do is a book that should be in every chaplain’s library not as a reference book, but a resource that provides an emotional balance to the other drier reference and textbooks on thanatology. However, I must give you fair warning that reading Barbara Glanz’s What Can I Do may bring tears to your eyes as it did to mine.

Glanz, Barbara A. What Can I Do: Ideas to Help Those Who Have Experienced Loss, Augsburg Books, Minneapolis, 2007, 163 pp.

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