{"id":1904,"date":"2007-04-28T22:12:43","date_gmt":"2007-04-28T22:12:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/04\/not-of-this-world.html"},"modified":"2007-04-28T22:12:43","modified_gmt":"2007-04-28T22:12:43","slug":"not-of-this-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/04\/not-of-this-world.html","title":{"rendered":"Not of This World"},"content":{"rendered":"

Put this one on your Netflix\/Blockbuster\/Whatever list: Not of This World, a 1999 Italian film about a religious sister who finds a baby in a park.<\/a><\/p>\n

Really. I’m not going to go into detail on the plot, because a great deal of the pleasure of the film is just that – the plot that unfolds at a rather leisurely pace, beginning with what seem like three separate \"Not\"<\/a> storylines that ever so gradually merge. But here are the bare bones: this religious sister, walking in a park in Milan one day, has a baby thrust into her arms by a fellow who has just found it. She takes the baby to the hospital, but keeps the sweater in which the baby was wrapped – she hopes to identify the baby’s mother by the dry-cleaning tag on the sweater. This takes her to a laundry run by a rather sad fellow who is distant from his employees, lives in his own world, and, at first, refuses the nun any help. Eventually, though, he relents..and there you go. <\/p>\n

The film is gentle and a bit slow. Sort of moody, I suppose, but I’d rather call it thoughtful. There are twists in the story, and it doesn’t go where you think it’s going more than once. Religious life is very respectfully and accurately presented. We see the full range of life in and around Milan, and in the ordinary lives of dry cleaners, gelateria workers, police officers, and so on. While religious imagery runs through the film, I’d have to say that the religious thematic material is rather lightly done. The film has more general point about the human yearning for connection, and how so much of the time it can be just a small thing – like a baby – that can reconnect us to each other and our own humanity,  if we only let it. <\/p>\n

Oh, and Katie and I just really like hearing people say, "Pronto!" when they answer the phone…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Put this one on your Netflix\/Blockbuster\/Whatever list: Not of This World, a 1999 Italian film about a religious sister who finds a baby in a park. Really. I’m not going to go into detail on the plot, because a great deal of the pleasure of the film is just that – the plot that unfolds…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nNot of This World - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/04\/not-of-this-world.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Not of This World - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Put this one on your Netflix\/Blockbuster\/Whatever list: Not of This World, a 1999 Italian film about a religious sister who finds a baby in a park. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1904\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}