Opinion columnist

Amid the turmoil and carnivalesque strangeness of 2017, it was easy to miss one of the year's softer, gentler trends: a little efflorescence of films and popular fascination dedicated to nuns. There's a nun tale for every age, of course, but our particular moment has given us nuns whose challenges reflect the unknowable, sometimes frightening possibilities that open up to us on the eve of change.

Nuns are nothing new in art and literature; in fact, some of the most contentious historical epochs have found a perfect vector for expression in women who wear the habit. The novel "The Song at the Scaffold," for example, written by a German Catholic during the 1930s, explored in fiction the lives of an order of Carmelite nuns executed for their disobedience during the French Revolution; one can imagine what the bloody juxtaposition of holy obedience and secular disobedience meant to European readers at the time. Likewise, Ron Hansen's 1991 novel "Mariette in Ecstasy," set at the turn of the century, contemplates the line between mysticism and hysteria through the story of a young sister whose intense piety paradoxically spurs doubt in her peers — a fitting parable for an age of sharpening contrasts between faith and reason. More recently, John Patrick Shanley's 2004 play (later cinematized as the 2008 film of the same title) "Doubt: A Parable" explored the complicated relationship among certitude, faith and authority in the story of a hard-nosed nun trying to suss out a priest's possible sexual abuse at her 1960s school.

Contrast is key in art depicting nuns. Back when the novella collection "The Decameron" was compiled in the 14th century, for instance, pious Europeans saw humor in the juxtaposition of the lewd and lascivious with nuns' holy virginity. And in the recent horror franchise "The Conjuring," terror emerges from the gap between a ghoulish nun's apparent holiness and her demonic powers. For the nuns of 2017, the contrast of interest was that between tradition — as signified by flowing habits, medieval artifacts (a whip for self-flagellation makes a prominent appearance in the Vatican II-era drama "Novitiate") and crumbling seaside temples — and change, as signified by, among other things, raunchy language, loose morals, momentous liturgical shifts, Snapchat and campaigns to end the Jedi Order.

Consider 2017's pop-cultural nuns. In "The Little Hours," a comedy taken from "The Decameron," exceedingly raunchy nuns battle each other's neuroses and temptation itself when faced with the arrival at their convent of a handsome peasant fleeing danger. None of the film's stars bother with medieval language or accents, and the contrast between the period garb and setting and the contemporary hang-ups and hijinks invites viewers to wonder if social progress ever really gets us that far, or if we're mostly rehashing the same human foibles — lust, rivalry, boredom, lunacy — over and over. Then there's "Novitiate," a beautifully shot and lyrical film about a teenage postulant who decides to enter religious life in the 1960s, just as the Catholic Church is undergoing contentious liturgical and cultural changes in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. The film's protagonist is caught between, on one side, her passion for Christ and the sometimes-comforting order of the habit, and on the other, a way of living her faith that may provide fewer definite answers even as it gives her room to breathe. Nuns — semiaquatic fish nuns, specifically — even made an appearance in "Star Wars: The Last Jedi," as caretakers of the original Jedi temple, a stand-in for tradition and mystic authority.

Meanwhile, societal fascination with nuns also enjoyed a small revival: On Twitter, the hashtag #NunWithAChainsaw trended after a Carmelite sister used such a tool to clear a road in Florida after Hurricane Irma; nuns shared their daily lives on Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter with the tag #MediaNuns; and a four-part TV series about former "party girls" taking up residence in a quiet abbey premiered in Britain.

The nuns of 2017 embodied the tension between embracing the past and turning to the future, and the impossibility of knowing precisely what we're due in the exchange of the old and constricting for the new and different. The past has its frustrations and its fixations, but the future is fraught with instability and uncertainty. It's crucial that the characters facing this dilemma are women: Though they assert themselves powerfully in their choices and distinctive ways of life, they are also bound by traditions and vows with roots in a world far less progressive than our own. When we turn away from the past, do we turn toward something better or something worse — or perhaps toward something merely strange?