From "To Kill a Mockingbird" to "O Brother, Where Art Thou?," this collection of 31 devotionals incorporates popular movies with passages from Scripture. Each devotional includes a meditation, questions to encourage reflection, a prayer, and a hymn.
Praying the Movies is a collection of thirty-one devotions that connect movies with the spiritual life of moviegoers. Each devotion contains a passage from Scripture, a description of a scene from a popular film, and a meditation connecting the themes in the scene to the Scripture passage. Also included in each devotion are questions to encourage further reflection, a suggestion for a hymn, and a brief prayer.
Movies do more than tell a good story. Filmspotting co-host Josh Larsen brings a critic's unique perspective to how movies can act as prayers—expressing lament, praise, joy, confession, and more. When words fail, the perfect film might be just what you need to jump-start your conversations with the Almighty.
Links film history with church history over the past century, illuminating America’s broader relationship with religious currents over time Moments of prayer have been represented in Hollywood movies since the silent era, appearing unexpectedly in films as diverse as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Frankenstein, Amistad, Easy Rider, Talladega Nights, and Alien 3, as well as in religiously inspired classics such as Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments. Here, Terry Lindvall examines how films have reflected, and sometimes sought to prescribe, ideas about how one ought to pray. He surveys the landscape of those films that employ prayer in their narratives, beginning with the silent era and moving through the uplifting and inspirational movies of the Great Depression and World War II, the cynical, anti-establishment films of the 60s and 70s, and the sci-fi and fantasy blockbusters of today. Lindvall considers how the presentation of cinematic prayer varies across race, age, and gender, and places the use of prayer in film in historical context, shedding light on the religious currents at play during those time periods. God on the Big Screen demonstrates that the way prayer is presented in film during each historical period tells us a great deal about America’s broader relationship with religion.
Juggling motherhood and her job as a real-estate agent, Elizabeth Jordan wishes her husband could help more around the house. But Tony’s rising career as a pharmaceutical salesman demands more and more of his time. With a nice home in the suburbs and a lovely young daughter, they appear to have it all—yet they can’t seem to spend time together without fighting. Hoping for a new listing, Elizabeth visits the home of Clara Williams, an elderly widow, and is both amused and uncomfortable when Clara starts asking pointed questions about her marriage and faith. But it’s Clara’s secret prayer room, with its walls covered in requests and answers, that has Elizabeth most intrigued . . . even if she’s not ready to take Clara’s suggestion that she create a prayer room of her own. As tensions at home escalate, though, Elizabeth begins to realize that her family is worth fighting for, and she can’t win this battle on her own. Stepping out in blind faith, putting her prayers for her family and their future in God’s hands, might be her only chance at regaining the life she was meant for.
More than 500,000 copies sold! Updated and expanded! Prayer is hard. Often, unless circumstances demand it—such as an illness or saying grace before a meal—most of us simply do not pray. This kind of prayerlessness can leave us with a distressed spirit and practical unbelief characterized by fear, anxiety, joylessness, and spiritual depression. A Praying Life is a prayer guide that has encouraged thousands of Christians to pursue a vibrant prayer life full of joy and power and has helped them learn how to pray faithfully and courageously. A life of prayer invites you to a life of connection to God. When Jesus describes the intimacy that He seeks with us, He talks about joining us for dinner (Revelation 3:20). This book reminds readers that prayer is simply making conversation with God a rhythm of daily Christian life. A Praying Life includes chapters about: How to deal with unanswered prayer How to start a prayer journal Does prayer make a difference? Now with added chapters addressing prayers of lament and further guidance for using prayer cards, Paul Miller invites you to foster prayer that regularly hopes, trusts, and expects God to act. Learn to develop helpful habits and approaches to prayer that will enable you to return to a childlike faith and witness spiritual growth today! “This book will be like having the breath of God at your back. Let it lift you to new hope.” —Dan B. Allender, PhD, author of Bold Love
2015 marks the 30th anniversary of Lee Mitchell’s great standard work on the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. As his student, protégée, and colleague, Ruth Meyers takes this classic work and updates it for the Church in its current era and for the future.
Men bring distinctive gifts - and challenges - to the spiritual enterprise of prayer. Praying in Black and White honors the unique wiring of men and offers a simple, concrete approach to prayer. With a pen and a piece of paper, men are free to bring their skepticism, task-orientation, self-sufficiency, and independence into a new connection with God.
Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures is the first book to collect manifestoes from the global history of cinema, providing the first historical and theoretical account of the role played by film manifestos in filmmaking and film culture. Focusing equally on political and aesthetic manifestoes, Scott MacKenzie uncovers a neglected, yet nevertheless central history of the cinema, exploring a series of documents that postulate ways in which to re-imagine the cinema and, in the process, re-imagine the world. This volume collects the major European “waves” and figures (Eisenstein, Truffaut, Bergman, Free Cinema, Oberhausen, Dogme ‘95); Latin American Third Cinemas (Birri, Sanjinés, Espinosa, Solanas); radical art and the avant-garde (Buñuel, Brakhage, Deren, Mekas, Ono, Sanborn); and world cinemas (Iimura, Makhmalbaf, Sembene, Sen). It also contains previously untranslated manifestos co-written by figures including Bollaín, Debord, Hermosillo, Isou, Kieslowski, Painlevé, Straub, and many others. Thematic sections address documentary cinema, aesthetics, feminist and queer film cultures, pornography, film archives, Hollywood, and film and digital media. Also included are texts traditionally left out of the film manifestos canon, such as the Motion Picture Production Code and Pius XI's Vigilanti Cura, which nevertheless played a central role in film culture.