There are, sure, little plot fragments tying up pieces from last time: cancer-ridden new believer Amy Ryan (Trish LaFache) is stunned to find her cancer has gone away, in some kind of inexplicable event that has no apparent cause according to the rules of physics, and she simply cannot articulate what could possibly be going on, because this franchise's conception of what non-believers can comprehend apparently supposes that the word "miracle" is some kind of shibboleth. They do, to their credit, accurately use the phrase voir dire, and a significant plot point hinges on the difference between a peremptory challenge and a challenge for cause.Īnother point in the film's favor: unlike the first movie, there is only one real plot this time, with none of the spurious add-ons jockeying for attention. I have, admittedly, not been in a courtroom either, but I have seen many courtroom thrillers, and this also seems to have been a level of research not conducted by the filmmakers. They have also probably not ever been in a courtroom, to guess from what happens after Grace ends up being sued (by the ACLU, if I read it right - the school board almost has to sue her, but ends up letting "them" handle it instead, and I can't imagine who else "them" would be in context). Anybody?"Īnyway, the point is that the people who made God's Not Dead 2 - writers Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon, director Harold Cronk (all of them holdovers from God's Not Dead) - have not, I think, ever actually spoken to a teacher, or ever been inside of a school. It was in a book? I will also accept 'Gangster's Paradise'. And if I had a student needling me in class about theology, I would have wept tears of pure joy that I had someone who wanted to talk, instead of spending a whole fucking minute robotically looking back and forth at bored STEM majors asking "So, does 'dark and desolate valley of segregation' feel like an allusion to anything? A famous saying you might have heard? About a valley of shadow? Of death? Remember, he was a minister. The idea that I might be targeted by the ACLU for spreading dangerously religious ideas - and at a publicly-funded university, no less! - felt about as real as the idea that I might be gunned down by Eliot Ness for running a moonshine empire.
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This is particularly hilarious to me, because when I saw God's Not Dead 2 for the first time in April 2016, * I was literally just days away from analysing the "I Have a Dream" speech with a classroom full of college freshman, and as a committed atheist and left-wing graduate student (and who is leftier than a grad student?), can you guess what my feelings might have been about delving into Jesus and the Bible in discussing King's rhetoric? My feeling is that it would have been pedagogical malpractice not to minutely examine how the reverend doctor's Baptist faith directly influenced his political activism and speech writing. Week, and in discussing King's strategy of non-violence, Brooke asks if this might have been influenced by Jesus's teaching to "turn the other cheek".
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One of her students, Brooke Thawley (Hayley Orrantia), has been kicking the wheels on becoming a Christian herself, following a sudden family tragedy, and has briefly discussed this with Grace. See, there's this high school history teacher Grace Wesley (Melissa Joan Hart, perhaps atoning for her seven years promoting paganism to children as Sabrina, the teenage witch), who is known to be a devout Christian. No such hedging for God's Not Dead 2 (for it is written, no segment of the film industry is so pure as to avoid the siren song of a sequel to massive hit, not even Pure Flix), a film with an asinine concept that hits me directly where I live. 2014's God's Not Dead has a loopy, auto-erotic concept that makes no sense, but I can vaguely see how, if you were so deep in the culture war trenches that you needed binoculars to see daylight, it might seem like its story of hostile academics trying to humiliate the Christ out of their students speaks to something important in the world.