Christian Charity Meets Its Match

Anyone who saw last year’s standout documentary, Jesse Moss’ The Overnighters, probably noted a brief, sober coda to the story: one of the film’s subjects, Keith Graves, was recently convicted of sex-trafficking and drug possession in a court in North Dakota. In the film, Graves’ presence as a guest in the house of Williston’s Lutheran pastor is a crisis point in a story that tests the limits of a fundamental value: love of neighbor. But the film also offers a powerful meditation on the social costs of environmental destruction, and, in this case, religion’s unexpected role in the unfurling of a many-limbed tragedy.