Just a quick glance at the headlines will reveal how many conflicts and massacres in our world find their roots in religious differences. While believers of any given faith are quick to blame the misguided and evil intentions of all those other religions, the wise will assert that all religions have blood on their hands. (Well, maybe not the Jains.)
And yet, the same religion can inspire both the Thirty Years' War and Bach's cantatas, suicide bombers and the Sufi poetry of Rumi. Religion is the repository of man's highest and lowest impulses, and time has proven it's nearly impossible to separate the two.
We find both extremes in a pair of films on offer this month: "Of Gods and Men" is a profoundly sympathetic look at the true story of a small French monastery in Algeria caught up in the civil war of the 1990s; "Agora" is a historical drama that is set in Egypt in the days of the Roman Empire and finds pagans, Christians and Jews trying to convert or slaughter each other.