Stranger like me: we might stumble, but walking a mile in someone else's shoes can teach us all a lesson in humility and respect.

ACCORDING TO MATTHEW, Mark, and Luke, the second great commandment is, "Love your neighbor as yourself." But the command to love the stranger is actually much more prominent in the Bible, appearing more than 30 times in various forms. God felt the need to remind us so often of this duty because the temptation to overlook or demonize strangers is so strong. In scripture and history our worst crimes have always been committed against "strangers" and "aliens."

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Like the Bible three current films remind us of our ties to strangers. By telling stories of "foreigners," these movies invite us to step into alien worlds populated by people who turn out to be--surprisingly enough--a lot like us, and we end up discovering that the stranger is actually, as Adam proclaimed, "bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh."

ACCORDING TO SCRIPTURE, HOSPItality is our first duty to strangers, and in Under the Same Moon (Fox Searchlight), Patricia Riggen and Ligiah Villalobos tell a sweet and heartbreaking tale about one of the millions of undocumented immigrants seeking hospitality in the United States. Every Sunday morning 9-year-old Carlitos (Adrian Alonso) gets a call from his mother, Rosario (Kate del Castillo), who left Mexico to work as a domestic in Los Angeles. For five long years these calls and a stream of monthly checks and gifts have been the only link between mother and child, and when Carlitos' grandmother dies suddenly, the lonely tyke decides to set out to find his morn. The journey, of course, is filled with obstacles. Dangerous people try to rob and kidnap the child, while INS agents and police officers pose a constant threat from which Carlitos must repeatedly run and hide. But there are also Good Samaritans who come to the boy's assistance and help spirit him on his way to Rosario.

Under the Same Moon puts a particularly adorable face on the immigration issue, contrasting the natural ties between mother and child with the artificial boundaries of states. The film clearly romanticizes the struggles of millions of undocumented immigrants, much as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath idealized the pain and suffering of an earlier wave of migrant farmers from America's dust bowl. Still, Steinbeck's sentimental novel opened the eyes (and heart) of a young Texas school teacher named Lyndon Johnson, the president who later launched America's war on poverty. Perhaps Under the Same Moon will open some other eyes and hearts to the suffering of today's migrants.

IN THE BIBLE THOSE OFFERING HOSPITALITY ARE rewarded with new life--Sarah and Abraham receive the child Isaac--and in writer-director Tom McCarthy's new film, The Visitor (Overture Films), a dour and depressed middle-aged economics professor from Connecticut gets a new lease on life after offering hospitality to a pair of undocumented strangers.

When Walter (Richard Jenkins) drops into Manhattan for an academic conference, he discovers his loft has been illegally sublet to a Syrian drummer named Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and his Senegalese girlfriend Zainab (Danai Jekesai Gurira). After the initial shock, Walter returns the surprise by extending the welcome mat to these strangers, and soon the professor, invigorated by his guests, finds himself sampling strange cuisines and drumming in the park with his new friend Tarek.

But when the INS arrests Tarek, Walter must decide if this stranger is really his friend and neighbor. Will he, like the Good Samaritan, go out of his way for someone his society sees as an outcast? Will he side with the stranger against his own nation's inhospitality?

In asking these questions, McCarthy's film invites us to stand with Walter and Tarek and see our immigration laws from their (and the Bible's) point of view.

THE GOOD SAMARITANS IN ERAN KOLIRIN'S The Band's Visit (Sony Pictures Classics) are Israelis, and the strangers to whom they provide an evening's hospitality are Arabs.

In this understated comedy eight nattily uniformed members of the Alexandrian Ceremonial Police Orchestra arrive one evening at a remote Israeli village to perform at the newly constructed Arab cultural center. But this wide spot in the road is the wrong desert outpost.

Here, as Dina (Ronit Elkabetz), the beautiful roadside cafe owner, tells Colonel Tawfiq Zacharya (Sasson Gabai) and his Egyptian band of Lawrence Welk lookalikes, there is no cultural center, nor is there a hotel or another bus out of town. Without bed or board, the melancholy strangers in powder blue are good and stuck.

In spite of protests from Tawfiq and a customer, Dina puts the Colonel and baby-faced Haled (Saleh Bakri) up in her own sparse apartment. And so the Egyptian musicians find themselves spending an awkward but touching evening with Israeli strangers, an evening in which both parties are forced to rely upon small pieces of chit-chat and little bits of music to bridge the linguistic and political divides that separate them from one another.

Sometimes these small efforts succeed, but just as often they fall flat, and--ironically enough--it is in these failed connections that the film illustrates a shared sense of loneliness haunting all of our lives in different ways. As Kolirin sees it, each of us is a stranger in need of a little hospitality.

CHRISTIAN ETHICIST STANLEY HAUERWAS has argued we should tell only stories that recognize the full and complex humanity of all our neighbors, while Harper Lee noted in To Kill a Mockingbird that if you want to understand someone you need to walk around inside their shoes a while. By telling us stories about people we normally think of as strangers or foreigners, and by letting us walk around inside their lives for a mile or two, these three films help us to recognize folks from faraway places with strange sounding names as neighbors, or flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone.

McCormick's quick takes

These films demonstrate stranger danger all around:

Dirty Pretty Things (Miramax, 2002)

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El Norte (Cinecom, 1983)

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Touch of Evil (Universal, 1958)

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By PATRICK MCCORMICK, professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.