I thought about live blogging the 2008 Oscars, but of course, got too caught up in our Oscar Party. The highlight of the evening simply had to be Jon Stewart bringing Marketa Irglova back out to give her acceptance speech. In an awards ceremony full of surprises, most notably the best and supporting actress categories [...]
At its most basic level, the convergence culture about which Henry Jenkins writes depends on marketing and the market interaction between producers and consumers. Of course, his intention is to explore this relationship to much deeper, more significant ends; however, his study has to begin with marketing, and it does, in a way, with his [...]
Traditionally speaking, most serious scholars would scoff at the idea of turning to popular culture for lessons in political discourse, religious consciousness, or educational formation. Yet this is just what Henry Jenkins, a professor of humanities and the founder and director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, has done in his recent book, [...]
Depending on the film or those involved in its creation, commentaries can either be truncated courses in filmmaking or shallow stories about what the actors did in their downtime on the shoot. Guillermo del Toro and Pedro Almodovar both give great, really educational commentaries, and Roger Ebert‘s infectious love for cinema makes his commentaries on [...]
For those of you who think that competitive video gaming began with Halo tournaments…. Wait, did any of you actually know about the world of competitive video gaming? Well if you did, then you most likely know that it began long before Madden tournaments back to the prehistoric days of the earliest arcade games like [...]
Rumor has it the writers’ strike will end later this week. Apparently, the big issues have all been settled and small details will be ironed out before week’s end. This bodes well not only for fans of shows like Lost and The Office, but for Oscar fans as well, seeing as the Academy Awards show [...]
A new book has made an exciting contribution to the on-going study of the relationship between film and religion. Film and Religion: An Introduction by Paul V. M. Flesher and Robert Torry is an example of the kind of serious “religious critique” of films that must take precedence in this field if it is to [...]
Happy Super Sunday! Super Bowl Sunday is the high holy day of American Civil Religion, bordering on holiday status. I often joke that if I were elected president, I would make the Monday following the Super Bowl a national holiday. Want to write me in? Theologians and scholars of religion have paid increasing attention to [...]
I have wanted to write about the HBO crime drama series, The Wire, for quite some time now. However, I have been unable to focus on any single point of spiritual entry into a series with such an unimaginable wealth of rich characters and complex scenarios on which to reflect. I also find it difficult [...]
