"Explores how Christians can connect with culture using movies and biblical accounts, helping Christians learn to apply their faith to the world around them"--
People love films. Whether it is going out for an evening to the cinema or curling up at home with a DVD, movies are one of our favourite forms of entertainment. It is important for our Christian growth that we learn to watch films thoughtfully rather than just seeing them as entertainment. It's important that we understand the messages which films communicate and how they relate to the good news of Jesus Christ. There are also important sections on 'questions to consider when watching a film' and 'the problem of content - sex and violence'.
Sanctuary Cinema provides the first history of the origins of the Christian film industry. Focusing on the early days of film during the silent era, it traces the ways in which the Church came to adopt film making as a way of conveying the Christian message to adherents. Surprisingly, rather than separating themselves from Hollywood or the American entertainment culture, early Christian film makers embraced Hollywood cinematic techniques and often populated their films with attractive actors and actresses. But they communicated their sectarian message effectively to believers, and helped to shape subsequent understandings of the Gospel message, which had historically been almost exclusively verbal, not communicated through visual media. -- Publisher's Description.
Religious Communication Association's Book of the Year Hollywood and Christianity often seem to be at war. Indeed, there is a long list of movies that have attracted religious condemnation, from Gone with the Wind with its notorious "damn," to The Life of Brian and The Last Temptation of Christ. But the reality, writes William Romanowski, has been far more complicated--and remarkable. In Reforming Hollywood, Romanowski, a leading historian of popular culture, explores the long and varied efforts of Protestants to influence the film industry. He shows how a broad spectrum of religious forces have played a role in Hollywood, from Presbyterians and Episcopalians to fundamentalists and evangelicals. Drawing on personal interviews and previously untouched sources, he describes how mainline church leaders lobbied filmmakers to promote the nation's moral health and, perhaps surprisingly, how they have by and large opposed government censorship, preferring instead self-regulation by both the industry and individual conscience. "It is this human choice," noted one Protestant leader, "that is the basis of our religion." Tensions with Catholics, too, have loomed large--many Protestant clergy feared the influence of the Legion of Decency more than Hollywood's corrupting power. Romanowski shows that the rise of the evangelical movement in the 1970s radically altered the picture, in contradictory ways. Even as born-again clergy denounced "Hollywood elites," major studios noted the emergence of a lucrative evangelical market. 20th Century-Fox formed FoxFaith to go after the "Passion dollar," and Disney took on evangelical Philip Anschutz as a partner to bring The Chronicles of Narnia to the big screen. William Romanowski is an award-winning commentator on the intersection of religion and popular culture. Reforming Hollywood is his most revealing, provocative, and groundbreaking work on this vital area of American society.
Savior on the Silver Screen examines nine movies about the life of Jesus - ranging from the traditional to the provocativeand explores how the image of Jesus in each reflects the time and culture in which the film was produced. The selections encompass silent, foreign, epic, and musical films. Both entertaining and insightful, Savior on the Silver Screen is structured for easy use in classroom, small group, and individual settings and includes rental information and practical tips for using the book. For each film there is an introduction, pre-viewing and post-viewing questions, and a discussion of its major features. -- Provided by publisher.
Bryan Stone engages the cinema to open a discussion of theology and the culture of our time by pairing specific Christian doctrines found in the Apostles' Creed with popular movies and videos.
In this book the author reveals the truth behind what you see on screen. Movies are much more than just flickering lights on a wall. Movies matter. Movies impact your life every day, even if you never watch one. Why can movies affect us so deeply? How can one producer, actor, director, or writer change the way we think? Movies will continue to radically modify our culture. Find out how -- and why. Learn how you can play a part in changing our cluture for the dacades ahead, and how to guide your children to do the same. -- from back cover
Religion and cinema share a capacity for world making, ritualizing, mythologizing, and creating sacred time and space. Through cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing, and other production activities, film takes the world “out there” and refashions it. Religion achieves similar ends by setting apart particular objects and periods of time, telling stories, and gathering people together for communal actions and concentrated focus. The result of both cinema and religious practice is a re-created world: a world of fantasy, a world of ideology, a world we long to live in, or a world we wish to avoid at all costs. Religion and Film introduces readers to both religious studies and film studies by focusing on the formal similarities between cinema and religious practices and on the ways they each re-create the world. Explorations of film show how the cinematic experience relies on similar aesthetic devices on which religious rituals have long relied: sight, sound, the taste of food, the body, and communal experience. Meanwhile, a deeper understanding of the aesthetic nature of religious rituals can alter our understanding of film production. Utilizing terminology and theoretical insights from the study of religion as well as the study of film, Religion and Film shows that by paying attention to the ways films are constructed, we can shed new light on the ways religious myths and rituals are constructed and vice versa. This thoroughly revised and expanded new edition is designed to appeal to the needs of courses in religion as well as film departments. In addition to two new chapters, this edition has been restructured into three distinct sections that offer students and instructors theories and methods for thinking about cinema in ways that more fully connect film studies with religious studies.
You know about Noah, but what about the animals? Thimblerig is a little groundhog with big problems. He's a loner con-artist who's losing his mojo; the wild dogs who run the forest harass him at every turn; he's started having vivid nightmares of apocalyptic floods; and worst of all - he believes he sees unicorns when everyone knows unicorns are only the stuff of legend. But what one animal calls problems, Thimblerig calls opportunity. His problems inspire him to come up with the ultimate con: convincing a group of gullible animals that a world-ending flood is coming, that the fabled unicorns have told him where the only safe place will be, and that only he can lead them to safety. And all for a reasonable price, of course. But when the flood really does come, Thimblerig has a choice to make: either he really does save the ones who have trusted him, or he loses everything. And he discovers that his problems have only just begun.