I recently saw a couple of films back-to-back that couldn’t have been more different (I’m already in love with being in the center of the movie universe here in L. A.). Unless you’re hiding under a rock, you know the latest installment of the Iron Man franchise is currently in theaters. You might be less familiar [...]
Maybe you weren’t aware of it, but white evangelical maleness ended last week, with the dismissal of Tim Tebow from the New York Jets and the coming out of Jason Collins. Daniel D’Addario of Salon suggests Tebow may be the last mainstream evangelical celebrity. D’Addario points to the overall waning of evangelical influence on the [...]
I’m currently working on an article on images of trauma in film for the independent film journal, Cinemascope. The call for papers included a quote from French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, who argues that film is “always sacred and never religious” because the sacred is “elusive and indefinable, faraway from reality.” This strikes me as a [...]
I had the opportunity to give a talk at the PSR Sacred Snapshots event in Berkeley on April 20th about John Lennon as a rock-n-roll messiah. This is a variation on a lecture I’ve given as part of my “Pop Goes Religion” course. The conversation with those who attended reinforced for me the intense spiritual [...]
In recent years, much has been written about the historical relationship between religion (as an institution, and not just a theme) in the development of cinema. While it might not be as ground-breaking as advertised, William D. Romanowski’s newest book, Reforming Hollywood: How American Protestants Fought for Freedom at the Movies, reveals that there is fertile [...]
Steve Sudeth with a post on the little-known Charles Bradley, a one-time James Brown impersonator who has now released his own albums rich with spiritual overtones. More after the jump.
Finally getting around to writing about some music I’ve been listening to for the last few months, here’s some brief reviews of three albums that have made the rotation on my iPhone. Has Matisyahu become “spiritual but not religious?” Matisyahu, the Chasidic reggae star, has evolved both in sound and spirituality. Just the picture should [...]
Spring Breakers isn’t necessarily the year’s first must-see film, but it might be one of the first “you really might want to see it” films. But be warned, writer/director Harmony Korine‘s tale of spring-break gone terribly wrong is full of potentially offensive images and dialogue. It’s not for the faint of heart, but it’s certainly a [...]
Occasional Pop Theology contributor Steve Sudeth shares his thoughts on “raising up a child in the way he should go” with particular attention to musical indoctrination. Hopefully, this is just the first in an on-going series of theologically compelling music around which parents and children can engage. More after the jump.
I find it somewhat fitting that, as the Supreme Court of the United States considers marriage equality, I finished up film historian Jeanine Basinger‘s latest book, I Do and I Don’t: A History of Marriage in the Movies. In her incisive, encyclopedic work, she takes readers through the history of “marriage movies” from the silents [...]
