On the surface, Daddio is a talker. It's a dialogue-heavy film, an unsurprising fact I suppose considering Hall's creative origins are rooted as a playwright. She also developed the 2020 television series I Am Not Okay With This. Daddio is a hard-sell for audiences, a small motion picture that takes place entirely within a yellow cab driven by Clark (Sean Penn). When a young woman we never know as anything but Girlie (Dakota Johnson) enters the cab at JFK headed for Manhattan, it's obvious we're in for something different.  

READ MY REVIEW OF DADDIO

If I were to describe the church at the center of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Eliza Griswold's "Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church," I would likely use a term popularized by folks like Tony Campolo and Shane Claiborne - "red letter Christian."

Started by Rod White, Circle of Hope could easily have been seen as a cousin to The Simple Way, the intentional community co-founded by Shane Claiborne that burst to familiarity after the popularity of Claiborne's "The Irresistible Revolution" became a bestseller. Claiborne's was a, and still is to a degree, the kind of popularity to which Jonny, one of the Circle of Hope pastors chronicled by Griswold, would likely aspire.

It has been these kinds of churches that have drawn a broad tapestry of believers. These are people tired of church in the traditional way yet not quite ready to let it go. They want to do church differently. When White and his family founded Circle of Hope in hopes of creating just such a home, a different kind of church that would love all and include all. Words like emergent, new monastic, and others offer a way to understand these churches, but they have always tended to draw the "other Christians" - people wounded by the church or deconstructionists or people who simply believe there has to be a better way.

READ MY REVIEW OF "CIRCLE OF HOPE"