Higgins: How Movies Helped Save My Soul: Finding Spiritual Fingerprints in Culturally Significant Films (2003)

In “How Movies Helped Save My Soul: Finding Spiritual Fingerprints in Culturally Significant Films”  writes Tony Campolo in the foreword, “calls us to go to the movies to hear and see sermons.” Gareth Higgins, an Irish Gen X-er, could be the textbook case of a postmodern young Christian, writing about movies in order to both explain his own idiosyncrasies and encourage others in the faith. In true post-modern fashion, Higgins insists that he is not providing a “right” interpretation of any of the films (well, except one or two), but offers the book as the opening shot in a volley-like dialogue. Seventeen chapters are arranged thematically around concepts like fear, justice, power, “anti-heroes” and war-popular po-mo topics. (And there’s a last-but-not-least factor: The Matrix scores its own closing chapter.) The writing is sassy, confessional and just darn funny; while some readers may be put off by Higgins’s tone of studied casualness, others will find his irreverence a welcome change. Also, the sheer breadth of the movies covered here is nothing short of amazing–it’s rare for a Christian book to have Disney films jockeying for space next to Quentin Tarantino and Stanley Kubrick. Bravo.