June 29, 2010

The challenge of telling other people’s stories is an occupational hazard for journalists, historians, memoirists, conflict mediators and even preachers. Getting the facts accurate is only part of the challenge. Storytellers have to grapple with the most effective way to tell the story and what perspective to take or interpretive remarks to include.

Storytelling is not just a matter of craft; it’s also a moral problem—because to a large extent we are our stories. If our stories are violated, so are we.

It is by living and dying that one becomes a theologian, Martin Luther said. With that comment in mind, we have resumed a Century series published at intervals since 1939 and asked theologians to reflect on their own struggles, disappointments, questions and hopes as people of faith and to consider how their work and life have been intertwined. This article is the eighth in the series.

It’s unlikely that the rest of 2010 will turn up another movie as astonishing as Vincere, by 70-year-old Italian director Marco Bellocchio. It’s a historical drama that covers the rise of Benito Mussolini from his beginnings as a socialist in the days before World War I. But the protagonist isn’t Il Duce; it’s his mistress, Ida Dalser.