God, guilt, and good art: What to read and watch this Good Friday

Two thousand years of Christianity have produced Augustine's confessions and Taylor Tomlinson's stand-up special, the Sistine Chapel and Ben-Hur, Graham Greene's whisky priest and Scorsese's Jesuits in Japan. The faith is large enough to contain all of it — the devout and the lapsed, the reverent and the irreverent, the people for whom it is everything and the people still working out what it once meant to them. Good Friday seems like the right day to sit with all of it. Here is where to start.

'The Confessions' by Saint Augustine

Written in the late fourth century, this is the original memoir — the template for every subsequent piece of writing in which a person examines the gap between who they are and who they wanted to be.

Augustine describes his years of dissolute living, his intellectual restlessness, his famous prayer ("Lord, make me chaste, but not yet") with phenomenal candour. For anyone who has ever felt the pull of belief alongside the equal pull of resistance, this is the book that has been waiting for them. Sixteen centuries old and not a word of it dated.

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'The Brothers Karamazov' by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The greatest novel ever written about faith, and also the greatest novel ever written about doubt — which is what makes it so extraordinary. The chapter titled 'The Grand Inquisitor', in which Ivan Karamazov constructs an argument against God that God himself cannot answer, is among the most devastating passages in all of literature. Dostoevsky, a devout believer, gives the atheist the better argument and then trusts the reader to sit with that. No novel demands more of its reader or offers more in return.

'Gilead' by Marilynne Robinson

An elderly Congregationalist pastor in Iowa writes letters to his young son, knowing he will die before the boy is old enough to understand them. That is the entire premise, and from it Robinson extracts something close to transcendence. This is a novel about grace — what it looks like in an ordinary life, in an unremarkable place, in the small accumulated weight of days lived with attention.

It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005. It is among the few works of contemporary fiction that take faith not as a problem to be interrogated but as a way of seeing.

'Ben-Hur' (1959, dir. William Wyler)

Charlton Heston, eleven Academy Awards, the chariot race that still holds up as one of the most viscerally thrilling sequences in cinema history. What gets overlooked, amid the scale of it, is how the film handles the figure of Jesus — always at the margins of the frame, never shown directly, present only in his effect on the people around him. It is a more sophisticated theological choice than it appears.

'The Last Temptation of Christ' (1988, dir. Martin Scorsese)  Controversial

Banned in several countries on release, picketed in others, condemned by the Vatican — and worth every minute of the controversy. Scorsese's adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis's novel imagines a Christ who is fully, agonisingly human.

The point, which the protests mostly missed, is not blasphemy but the opposite — that the sacrifice means nothing if there was nothing to sacrifice. Willem Dafoe's performance is extraordinary. The film asks what it would actually cost to be who Jesus was.

'Doubt: A parable' by John Patrick Shanley Controversial

A play before it was a film — the 2008 adaptation stars Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman at the height of their powers. A nun suspects a priest of inappropriate conduct with a student. She has no proof but predictably acts anyway. The play never resolves whether she was right — it ends on the word "doubt" and leaves the audience to sit with it.

'Prodigal Daughter' by Taylor Tomlinson  Controversial

Released on Netflix in February 2026, filmed inside Fountain Street Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan — a progressive congregation that has hosted Eleanor Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Angela Davis from its pulpit, and apparently saw no contradiction in adding Taylor Tomlinson to the list. Tomlinson, who grew up in what she describes as a "scary Christian house", works through her complicated relationship with the faith she was raised in.

Her observation that she hopes to die in a way that looks good on jewellery will either make you laugh immediately or confirm you are watching the wrong special. The interesting thing is that the church loved it.

'The Power and the Glory' by Graham Greene

Greene's 1940 novel follows a nameless whisky priest in Mexico during a period of violent anti-clerical persecution — a man who is, by most measures, a failure: an alcoholic, a coward, the father of an illegitimate child. He is also, perhaps, a saint.

Greene was a Catholic convert whose faith never sat comfortably with him, and that discomfort is the engine of everything he wrote. This novel in particular asks whether grace can operate through a person fully aware of his own unworthiness — and whether that awareness might, paradoxically, be what qualifies him.

'Silence' (2016, dir. Martin Scorsese)

Yes, twice — because the film earns its own entry. Scorsese spent 28 years trying to make this adaptation of Endo's novel, and the result carries that weight visibly. Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver as the Jesuit missionaries, Liam Neeson as their fallen mentor.