About Us

“Would you like to read a movie script?”

“No way!” I rejected.  ……um, can you send me the script anyway?”  Curiosity got the best of me.  Now, I’m hooked.

Not a very deliberate, thought-out entry into the world of community education and outreach.  However, this is how it all started.   An invitation from a friend to look at a piece of art that was a work in progress.  I guess, in a way, it is an analogy about life too – a work in progress.

After reading the Frank vs God script, I felt a tug to help solve the dilemma of how to talk about God and life to my two kids and many like them.  My personal experience from high school days included watching church sponsored entertainment that was corny, awkward and out of touch with my experience.  The topics were important, but the presentation was so stilted to make the desired point, the message felt contrived.

When I watch movies and popular entertainment, I sometimes notice that faith in god is ridiculed by innuendo or engineered to look foolish, helpless, or out of touch with reality.  This film impressed me as different.  Starting with the script, it blends Hollywood caliber entertainment and storytelling with a thoughtful evaluation of faith and God.  I personally see this film as an open invitation to explore the existence of God and the impact faith can have in our lives.

Wherever you are in your own life journey and the pathway between acceptance or rejection of the existence of God, I think this film tickles the spirit to take another step towards evaluating your standing.  It encourages you to take thoughtful steps in your own life and community to reach out as you are and help one-another in our shared human condition.  If the conversation is about god, then that is a good thing; we started FamilyCut to evaluate faith and the human condition.

There is great entertainment that covers meaningful topics and provides interpretation and insightful discoveries into our shared, complex human condition.  Sometimes it is hard to find.  Great entertainment and art can provide the spark to engage our thoughts and feelings about important topics.  Oftentimes, important topics are the most difficult ones to bring up in conversation because we might worry about how the listener will respond.  We may wonder: will they like me less because of what I say, will they make fun of me, will it start a disagreement?  By playing it safe, we can miss chances to learn and grow.  From my experience, by sharing a common work of art as a base, we can more easily enter delicate topics.

Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert taught me that the best way to learn about something is to ask someone who has experienced it.  So, by stifling conversation on important topics, we can stumble through life without actually evaluating topics that can provide profound impact in our lives and provide a rudder to our life and life’s events.  I want to create guides that are fun, engaging, and facilitate discovery on topics that are important to our humanity.  The objective of our guides are to make it productive, easy, and safe, for self discovery and to talk with others.  The more thoughtful conversations we have about important human topics, the more supportive of ourselves and our human condition we will become.  I hope our guides can facilitate ongoing discussion stimulated by great entertaining art.  Put simply: our guides leverage art to continue the important dialog the art inspires.  We want the art to speak fully by making themes more accessible to thoughtful conversation and examination.

Our product today is only part of what we want to bring to our community.  We feel our discussion guide does a good job at drawing out the key  themes and facilitating dialog to discover critical decision points.  That is the power of the discussion guide today – to lead participants to key decision points. What we want to do next is provide resources for further examination into individual topics of particular interest.

For example, if you identify faith, god, anger, dependency, or guilt as the one topic of particular interest, then we would like to provide you suggestions for further exploration for the:

• heart and funny-bone, we would like to point towards works of art: novels, documentaries, movies, music, etc that might be of further interest for exploration.
• mind and spirit, we would like to provide you with suggested readings from your own faith community that provides coverage on the topic.
• cerebral, we would like to provide suggested resources towards the great minds and intellect of our time, and all time, for standing on the shoulders of greats that have spent lifetimes focused on core themes of humanity.

We are still working on developing these three levels of resources.  The resources are out there, but which ones are most relevant and effective?  That is the challenge we face to introduce our community to more great resources that our thoughtful, insightful, and intellectual.  Resources that can take you form answering personal questions, to evaluating what others have experienced and discovered.  When we leverage what others have evaluated before us, we can become better informed to guide our own decisions and actions.

Of course, we have only touched on a few topics so far in our current guide.  We are also planning on building out new sections to our discussion guide.  At this time, additional themes we are considering for development are:

• prayer
• dependency and recovery
• profanity and why does it matter
• dying and grief
• psychoanalysis and prescription of the main film characters, and
• other topics

We are talking to some leading psychologists and theologians in these areas.  These themes, among other inspiring topics and special projects are on the drawing board.

We welcome your help.  Intellectual ideas, financial resources, spiritual support, and personal involvement, etc.  See our Contact Us form or Donate page.  Thank you for supporting our mission to explore life’s meaningful questions.