pharisaical

“I felt canceled,” Steve Katz, the band’s guitarist, confesses dolefully, and indeed the movie is a pharisaical effort to paint the musicians as victims of what we now call cancel culture: misunderstood, unreasonably maligned and never afforded a chance to explain themselves, until now.

They attend with Pharisaical strictness to the outward forms of religion, and at the same time neglect the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith.

This kind of Pharisaical preference for rules over humans reveals a large gap of spiritual education.

Rather, “Far from Home” follows the dictates of the series with a solemn and pharisaical rigidity, pursuing the didactic simplicity of its bland heroics with little other than a few snappy comebacks to distract from the lockstep drama.

I think of the Apostle Paul, the very model of evangelical Christianity, who was saved from his own Moore-like pharisaical hatreds by an encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus.