Watched it tonight. Amazing. A good priest who both advises a wife to talk to her husband and who can quote Kierkegaard. A popular prime-time television show quoting Kierkegaard??! Sustained reflections on death. A teenage girl assuring a dying little boy that there is a God and that God is with him.

Now, the parts where God talks to Joan sometimes are a little lame, to be sure. ("I can't tell you why there is evil because you wouldn't understand.") But you really can't blame anyone for that. The problem of reconciling a single all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving deity with the existence of evil hasn't been solved for a good three thousand years now, and it's not going to be solved in a CBS TV show. (An aside: the question of evil is not my area of study, but I think that Augustine in City of God takes as good a crack at it as anyone.)

But good show! CBS. You have given us honest dramatizations of serious human emotions in a package that the whole family can watch. That in itself seems almost a miracle.