Teaching Religion and Film

The course Film and Religion taught at the University of Wyoming focuses on how film uses religion rather than on how religion uses film. We analyze how main-stream movies appropriate religious imagery and themes, rather than how religions use film to communicate their beliefs and practices. The course thus becomes a study of the role of religion in popular culture and the way in which religion becomes the vehicle for aesthetic, social, political and other cultural purposes. These two emphases influence the course in different ways. The ways film uses religion provide the course's organizing framework, while the cultural debates in which religion appears comprise the ultimate question of analysis.