For more than two decades, Evangeline Lilly built a career inside some of Hollywood’s biggest and most fantastical worlds. She survived a mysterious island in “Lost,” fought alongside elves as the elf Tauriel in “The Hobbit,” and entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe as the superhero Wasp.

But at 47, the Canadian actress, author and mother of two said that despite her successful Hollywood career, her ambitions are now different.

“I retired from acting about five years ago,” Lilly told The Christian Post. “At my core, the thing that’s most important to me is my faith. What’s most important to me is philosophy and really thinking through the great questions, the big, huge, important questions in life.”

Those priorities are part of what drew Lilly to “Legend of Destruction,” a historical epic about the violent collapse of Jerusalem and destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D. Lilly voices Queen Berenice, a Jewish ruler caught between her people, her faith and the political forces threatening Jerusalem, and also serves as an executive producer on the film.

According to Lilly, the project offered her something her blockbuster career, despite all its rewards and accolades, never could: the opportunity to engage directly with questions of faith, morality, biblical history and human nature.

“I’m so proud to have been a part of these huge, incredible franchises that I got to be a part of,” she said. “I think in so many ways they were important to a lot of people, and also they don’t really satisfy my passions.”

Directed by Gidi Dar, “Legend of Destruction” was originally released in Israel in 2021 and uses hand-painted images to tell the story of the Jewish revolt against Rome and the internal divisions that helped bring Jerusalem to ruin. Other stars who contributed their voices to the film include Oscar Isaac, Elliott Gould and Billy Zane.

Lilly, an outspoken critic of using artificial intelligence to replace human artists, shared how she first encountered the film before the AI explosion in film and media. The actress said the film’s reliance on paintings, sound, vocal ability and camera movement is a countercultural “celebration” of human artistry, particularly today.

“It still felt to me like this incredible act of revolution to take the beauty of these hand-painted oil paintings and bring them to life through story and sound and camera movements,” she said, calling the result something “unique and singular” that she had never seen before.

Watching the paintings move across the screen, she added, feels like sitting around a fire listening to a story while images unfold in the imagination.

“This is what human art does,” she said. “We lived this story as a species. It has our collective blood in it, and it is told by human hands through human imagination and human heart.”

For Lilly, the film, which has already won four Israeli Academy Awards and recently opened in the U.S., also provided an opportunity to highlight a little-known biblical story. Queen Berenice appears briefly in the Book of Acts (Acts 25–26) alongside her brother, King Agrippa II, and Lilly said she was fascinated by the real-life woman who wielded significant influence in a male-dominated world.

“She was still a woman caught in the middle of all of these warring male egos and all of this warring male power,” Lilly said.

The film depicts Berenice facing an agonizing conflict between preserving the Temple, and with it her religious and familial heritage, while also protecting her own political position and survival.

“She has to decide: Will I live, and will I survive, or will my people and the Temple?” Lilly said. “It’s a real impossible situation that she’s put in, and it tests her to her full limit.”

Lilly said she has long been fascinated by biblical women and has a passion for delving into their stories. She pointed to Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah, whose story in Genesis is largely remembered through the violence committed against her.

“I find the same about Berenice,” Lilly said. “It was fun to have somebody fill out that picture. Who would she have been, and what would her life have been like, and what were the things she was wrestling with every day?”

Lilly shared how her own name carries a connection to her faith. She revealed how, as she became increasingly serious about her faith over the years, she researched the meaning of her name: Nicole Evangeline Lilly.

“It wasn’t until I became really passionately … dedicated to my faith that I was like, ‘I want to know what that name means,’” she recalled. “I found out it meant ‘victorious Evangelical bride of Christ,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s a big responsibility.’”

Before working on “Legend of Destruction,” Lilly said she knew little about the destruction of the Second Temple or the broader Jewish history surrounding the event. But after researching the film, the actress said she was particularly struck by the proximity of the events to Jesus’ life and crucifixion.

“Underneath every spiritual story in the Bible is always a political story,” Lilly said. “In this film, you get to see how those two things converged in the worst possible way. … In this story, there’s so much eye for an eye, and in the end, everyone winds up blind.”

Lilly added that “Legend of Destruction” serves as a warning about what can happen when ideology becomes more important than recognizing the humanity of the person on the other side.

“We’re living in a time where our ideologies and our ideas are coming before our humanity and our ability to see the other person as worthy of love, worthy of God’s love, worthy of our love,” she said.

“We choose to be divided, and it always ends in destruction,” she added. “We could catch ourselves now before … that sort of ship has sailed, and it’s gone too far. … We’re all so exhausted from the hatred and the division and the pain and the suffering and the death and the war that is going on all over the world. I think we all long for a different path, for a different solution.”

“We don’t have to keep going down the path of destruction,” Lilly said. “We can choose another way.”

After more than 20 years in Hollywood, the Hawaii resident said she no longer feels compelled by the “rat race” of proving herself or seeking affirmation. These days, she focuses on writing, study, reading and projects aligned more closely with her passions.

“The most wonderful gift of getting older is finally being able to give your time to really what matters to you,” she said.

“The rat race of trying to make it in the world, trying to prove yourself, trying to show everyone how great you are and get that affirmation that you’re looking for, which is an important part of the first half of life, is done,” she continued. “And now it’s time really to nourish and nurture your community and the world. … I call myself an elder in training right now because I’m middle-aged. I take that really seriously. It’s important that I devote my time now to things that really, really matter to me.”

“Legend of Destruction,” she said, is that kind of worthwhile project. She emphasized that through the film, she wants viewers to recognize something uncomfortable about themselves in its characters and understand the power of extending grace.

“Every single person in the film believed they were right, and every single person in the film did something very wrong, believing the whole time that what they were doing was righteous and good,” she said.

“We all think we are right, and we know, and the other person’s wrong, and they’re evil,” she said. “We’re human and flawed, and we [mess] up, and we’re going to do things wrong. … It is only by grace that the world has kept turning and humanity has survived. And so, just to remember that grace that is given to us should be passed on to our neighbor and our enemy.”
Sources:Christianpost

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Dolly Parton talked about God for 60 years and managed never to make it a dividing line. She said the way she came across was a choice.

“I look like a Jezebel,” she said on Khloé Kardashian’s podcast last year. “I want to feel like more people be drawn to that than if I came out like the Pentecostal women I grew up with. I really think that you can reach more people if you’re maybe on the edge, so to speak. I mean, if you look one way, but you’re another, it’s OK.”

It was the same instinct she described elsewhere in that conversation: she wanted God to work through her without anyone feeling preached at. “I go to that God core inside me,” she told The Christophers in a separate interview, one of the few times she got specific about what that meant day to day. Even her prayer life, she said, wasn’t formal. It was, in her words, “more a come-as-you-are.”

Parton died peacefully at her home in Nashville on Tuesday at 80. At her request the funeral will be small and private, and in lieu of flowers her family asked for donations to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library.

Her grandfather was a Pentecostal preacher, and she said the church she grew up in frightened her — “hellfire, brimstone,” which left her “so scared.” She said she found God on her own, as a girl, in an abandoned church building near her family’s house where people went to drink.

“It still had an old abandoned piano, and (it) had broken down. And this was where people go to drink, have sex, stuff written on the walls, but still had Bible verses and everything,” she said. “But I would go to that old church, and I felt the presence. I felt the presence there. And so it was in that old, abandoned church that I just praying to God the way that I — I was just saying, ‘Well, just show me, help me, save me, because I want to be ready.’ So it was then that I just had this peace fall over me, and I just felt like that I had, for the first time in my life, had truly found God.”

“It had to happen without fear and without influence and without anything else,” she said.

She talked to Him the same way for the rest of her life. “I say, ‘Hey, Dad.’ So I talk about everything. I talk out loud.” It was the same plainspoken theology she leaned on when she talked about her own place in the world, telling interviewers she believed people were, as she put it, pieces of God carrying “that little God-light inside us.”

The giving started with her father. Robert Lee Parton Sr. never learned to read, and in 1995 she started mailing free books every month to children from birth to age five in Sevier County, Tennessee, where she grew up.

“You know, in the Bible where it talks about honoring your father and your mother,” Parton said. “I don’t think that necessarily means just to obey them. I think it means to bring honor to their name.”

The Imagination Library mailed its 200 millionth book in 2023. One in seven American children under five now gets one in the mail every month.

Most of the rest of it ran through the same county. In 1991 she told seventh and eighth graders she would hand them $500 when they graduated high school — payable only if the buddy they picked graduated too. The dropout rate for those classes fell from more than 30% to 6%. The year before, after her niece Hannah Dennison was treated for leukemia at Vanderbilt’s children’s hospital, she gave the hospital $1 million and funded a butterfly garden named for her. In 2000 she set up a scholarship that awards $15,000 a year to five graduating seniors in Sevier County.

When wildfires killed 14 people there in 2016, her My People Fund sent $1,000 a month to more than 900 families whose homes had burned, then raised the final check to $5,000. The Dollywood Foundation gave roughly $9 million. “I’ve always believed that charity begins at home,” she said.

In April 2020 she gave $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in honor of Dr. Naji Abumrad, a surgeon she had befriended after a car accident. The money funded early coronavirus research, and when Moderna published its vaccine results in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Dolly Parton COVID-19 Research Fund was listed among the supporters. She said afterward she had gotten “more credit than I deserve.”

She put her royalties from Whitney Houston’s cover of “I Will Always Love You” into a predominantly Black neighborhood in Nashville.

“I just thought, ‘This was great. I’m going to be down here with her people, who are my people as well,’” she told Andy Cohen. “And so I just love the fact that I spent that money on a complex. And I think, ‘This is the house that Whitney built.’”

She was offered the Presidential Medal of Freedom three times and never took it — twice under Trump, citing her husband’s illness and then COVID, and once under Biden.

“I feel like if I take it, I’ll be doing politics,” she said.

Her husband of 60 years, Carl Thomas Dean, died in March 2025. “Carl is in God’s arms now,” Parton said then, “and I am OK with that.”

In an interview with People published Friday, four days before her death, she said she had been dealing with health issues she put off while caring for him.

“Seriously, though, even though I’m still healin’, I’m still workin’,” she said.

It was the same posture she’d described to Fox News Digital years earlier, when she said her whole career had run on the belief that, in her words, “through God, all things are possible.”
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Ten years after Keith and Kristyn Getty launched what was intended to be a one-time event celebrating a book about congregational singing, the Sing! Conference has grown into an international gathering of pastors, theologians, musicians and believers focused on strengthening the singing life of the Church.

This year, the conference will return to Nashville on Sept. 7–9 with the theme “Symphony of Scripture,” marking the 500th anniversary of William Tyndale’s English New Testament and examining the influence of the Bible on worship, theology, language, culture and the arts.

For Keith Getty, the Grammy-nominated hymn writer behind worship classics including “In Christ Alone,” “Christ Our Hope in Life and Death” and “The Lord Is My Salvation,” the focus reflects what he says has always been at the heart of the Sing! movement: helping Christians sing the truth of the Scriptures.

“There are many goals with the Sing! Conference: congregational singing, to improve high artistry, but I think at the heart of it is helping people sing the Bible,” the Irish artist told The Christian Post.

Getty, who shares four daughters with his wife, said the timing of the anniversary was particularly meaningful because the first Sing! Conference was deliberately postponed until 2017 so it could coincide with the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.

Now, its 10th gathering falls 500 years after Tyndale’s English New Testament helped make Scripture accessible to ordinary English-speaking Christians. The conference will also coincide with the 25th anniversary of the English Standard Version Bible.

According to Getty, this year’s conference will highlight not only how Scripture has shaped Christianity but also how singing biblical truth has shaped American life and the global Church.

The event, held at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center, will feature speakers alongside large-scale hymn sings, theological discussions, instructional sessions and orchestral performances. Crossway is also launching its “Symphony of Scripture” project, Getty said, and a full symphony orchestra will accompany the opening day’s programming before the Getty band takes a larger role beginning on the second day.

“We’re excited about all the potential this has to touch people, to bring the Bible to people in a fresh way and to a wider audience. It’s a really amazing missional opportunity,” he said.

Music and poetry are embedded throughout Scripture itself, Getty contended, and have historically functioned as a way of teaching and preserving biblical truth.

“Scripture itself is about 20 percent poems and songs,” Getty said. “The Bible is more biased towards songs and poetry than any Christian book written since. … Singing is exhilarating. It’s a holy privilege. It is doxological worship to our God and Heavenly Father. But it’s never less than instructional.”

What Christians sing, Getty said, helps shape what they believe and remember. He pointed to Martin Luther’s vision for the Reformation: Scripture should be opened in the language of ordinary people, pastors should faithfully explain it, and believers should carry biblical truths through song.

Luther, who Getty said is his “hero,” envisioned Scripture being opened “in the language of the people” so ordinary Christians could read the Bible while pastors explained and applied its truths. But Luther’s vision didn’t stop at biblical literacy, he said.

“People would carry the Bible out of church by being able to sing the Bible in their own tongue,” Getty said. “In other words, he thought the singing of the Bible had more to do with Monday to Saturday than the preaching or the reading of the Bible.”

For that reason, the hymn writer said strengthening congregational singing is “hugely important to our Christian health.”

He also sees that mission increasingly extending beyond the Western Church. The songwriter noted that much of Christianity’s growth is now occurring outside the English-speaking West, often in places without centuries-old traditions of hymnody. Part of Sing!’s mission, he said, is to “be a supporter” and “help stimulate” the singing life of churches around the world.

“The goal is, number one, to really reform it in the Western Church, and then to go out and be a supporter and someone who could help stimulate and contribute to the singing life of the Church around the world,” he said.

And that emphasis on theology and the power of worship is reflected in the speakers selected for this year’s conference, among them John Piper, John Lennox, Wes Huff, Sinclair Ferguson, Malcolm Guite and Os Guinness, among others.

“We take a theme each year and we share the platform with many people who we believe are wiser and more holy than we are,” he said. “The Sing Conference every year is, to some degree, what Kristyn and I have been learning in the last year, what we’ve been doing, what we’ve been writing, what we’ve been sharing.”

Unlike previous years, Piper won’t deliver expository Bible teaching at the conference, but will instead tell the story of Tyndale and the extraordinary personal cost of his determination to give English-speaking Christians access to Scripture.

“I think a lot of how grace is taught today is just way too casual. It’s way too easy,” Getty said, adding that for Tyndale, faithfulness meant being “turned down 100 times” and ultimately being killed for his work. “I think Piper has a great way of telling that.”

Huff, a Canadian Christian apologist who has gained a significant following, will focus on the credibility of Scripture. Getty said Huff is “appealing to a new generation” that churches and Christian conferences have not always successfully reached.

Meanwhile, Guite, an Anglican priest, poet and longtime Cambridge educator, will examine Tyndale’s influence on the English language and subsequent literature, while Guinness will address Christianity’s engagement with culture. Ferguson, a prolific author and speaker, will focus on theology and worship.

The conference will also address a decidedly 21st-century issue: artificial intelligence. Getty revealed that Huff and Oxford mathematician and Christian apologist John Lennox will participate in what he described as a first-of-its-kind conversation between the two on “biblical intelligence versus artificial intelligence and the future.”

“As we enter the AI age, both the confusing disparity of what people have known to be true in the past and what is the new reality that they’re going to discover in the next one to 10 years will be so dislocating,” Getty said. “With the internet … rose depression, and then social media rose anxiety. And I think what AI is going to do for loneliness and just the lack of any sense of friendship is so crazy.”

The response, according to Getty, shouldn’t be fear, but be to root Christians more deeply in eternal truths and in the physical community of the Church.

“I think all the more important that we sing of Heaven, that we think of Heaven, that our trust is [in] eternal things. Ultimately … our hope has to be in Heaven,” he said, adding that throughout Christian history, movements of renewal have consistently produced new songs.

“All great movements result in doxology,” Getty said. “They result in people singing because, as the hymn writer says, how can we keep from singing? We just can’t. That’s how we’re made.”

“The world was sung into being,” he added. “Heaven is a picture of God’s people singing, and we want to help equip the Church to engage more fully in worship.”
Sources:Christianpost

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