Finding grace in unexpected places

Three very different programmes – a football comedy, a rapper’s documentary and a glossy Western – find themselves circling questions of mercy, human dignity and what makes a life worth living

Delphine Chui

Can we believe our ancestors’ tales of the supernatural?

Fr Gavan Jennings

What Raphael understood about the Archangel

Daniel Beurthe

Depicting God’s messengers

7 min read

‘Ted Lasso’ (Season 4, Apple TV)

Coming into my seventh year as a practising Catholic, I find myself much more balanced in my approach to what I can enjoy and consume in popular culture. No longer am I afraid of what I might see; instead, I’m more curious about what I might discover or uncover – including how I find a kind of spiritual nourishment in an American football coach who has somehow ended up managing a fictional English football team. Ted Lasso, for all its crude humour and jokes, is beautifully preoccupied with what happens when wounded people choose to forgive one another.

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