Continue reading »]]> The field of the study of the connection between film and religion is steaming. New articles are being published all the time. I decided to share at least some of them on this site, despite that I won’t the time to post information about every single one of them. So without further due let me link to our new Articles page, currently with a single paper/thesis listed no it. More to come.

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Continue reading »]]> Steven D. Greydanus wrote an article at the National Catholic Register a couple of days ago titled ”Moses, Spielberg & DeMille: Why Spielberg should do the next Moses movie” After covering Spielberg’s past achievement and connections to DeMille he wrote,

 A successful Spielberg-directed Moses story could be a cultural landmark of immense significance. It could have an impact on a scale similar to The Passion of the Christ, but without the polarizing controversy. It could give a fundamental biblical story new currency for generations to come. Like DeMille’s film, it might even help renew awareness of the Ten Commandments and the foundational role of the Judeo-Christian heritage in Western civilization.

Of course there’s no guarantee that it would do any of these things. Depending on the screenplay (I have no idea what it looks like) and how Spielberg handles it, it could be terrible. Even on a best case scenario, it seems likely that there would be at least some drawbacks, and that caveats of some sort or other will be necessary.

I am a bit ambiguous about  the project. On one hand I would love to see such a movie. On the other hand I lament every time a classic literary (and in this case religious) works gets translated onto the big screen. I am afraid that the traditional literacy I cherish, which has to do with the ability of reading and understanding what you read, is getting replaced with visual literacy (and in many cases digital literacy) or the lack of them. I guess I am a bit conservative in this sense: I think each media has its own beauty and advantages and we as a society loose a lot if the next generation becomes more clueless about traditional literacy. What can I say? I like books AND movies, but afraid if on knows a work only through the later variation and not the original book, one can miss a lot of learning and joy.

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Continue reading »]]> Sarah Sentilles provides an intelligent review at Religion Dispatches of a new movie titled Higher Ground. She starts it with

Watching Higher Ground, Vera Farmiga’s directorial debut based on Carolyn Briggs’ memoir This Dark World, felt like catching a glimpse of a mythical creature I’d let myself imagine but never thought I’d see. But suddenly there it was, projected on a big screen: sophisticated and complex theological thinking, a female protagonist interested in ideas and books and God, a friendship between two women that has very little to do with men and everything to do with trusting your body and your mind, and the insidious nature of religiously sanctioned sexism and its devastating effects.

Read full review

Continue reading »]]> In order to serve the mission of this website (“To support the study of the connection between films and religion”) better I just created a new syllabi section, where I will collect syllabi of courses taught on the topic of film and religion. I gathered 29 syllabi to start with. To be more precise two of them were gathered by AAR’s Syllabus Project and eight by The Wabash Center. This initial 29 came from courses taught by 28 professors at 25 colleges, the oldest one from 1998 and 6 of them from this year.

Continue reading »]]> Dr David Tollerton wrote an article titled “Job of Suburbia? A Serious Man and Viewer Perceptions of the Biblical“ about the Coen brothers‘ movie A Serious Man, which will come out in the next issue of the Journal of Religion and Film. Its abstract reads

In the short period since its release in 2009, the notion that A Serious Man represents a retelling of the Book of Job has gained great currency. This is the case despite the film’s makers, Joel and Ethan Coen, denying that the biblical tale was their inspiration. This article considers the relationship between Job and A Serious Man and the motivations that may lie behind the assertion of parallels between the two. It is ultimately suggested that the relationship between film and text is more substantial if we look beyond the partial plot similarities to the theme of theological absurdity that both explore.

Read the rest

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