District 9: A Pop Theology Conversation

Pop Theology contributor Richard Lindsay and I discuss one of the year’s best movies after the jump. [Read more]

Michael Vick: On Judgement and Participation

Whenever pop culture icons exhibit bad behavior…behavior that would ruin the careers and lives of us average folk…the social commentators inevitably talk about how America is a forgiving culture.  As time passes, society will forgive and forget, or at least the most recent scandal will occupy our attention.  When the news story broke about Michael Vick’s involvement in a dog-fighting ring over a year ago, I thought that this would perhaps test the bounds of popular forgiveness. [Read more]

The Gospel According to U2

While I was living in London in Spring 2004, I came across a selection of sermons entitled Get Up Off Your Knees:  Preaching the U2 Catalog, which highlighted, in part, the very significant role that the Psalms play in the band’s creation of their songs and their role as contemporary prophets.  This sent my thinking about the band and their music into a whole different and more theological direction.  Another, more recent book about the band, We Get To Carry Each Other:  The Gospel According to U2 by Greg Garrett, has taken me a little bit further along that road. [Read more]

Teaching Religion and Film: A Review

As I have mentioned in other reviews of film and religion books, the interdisciplinary field is in something of its teenage years.  While it is a particularly strong field, it is at a point in its life where it must decide…or articulate…which path(s) it will take.  In his collection of essays, Teaching Religion and Film, Gregory J. Watkins brings together some of the finest thinkers, writers, and practitioners in the field to share their thoughts on possible next steps and the ways in which they are currently integrating the two in their classrooms.  In the process, the field takes a great leap forward. [Read more]

A Graphic Depiction of the Flood

We are quickly approaching the four year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.  I was living in Charlottesville, Virginia, at that time and was forced to keep up with those tragic events from news accounts and phone calls with family and friends.  The images on the screen and the stories I heard seemed literally otherworldly…the storm and broken levees things from a Roland Emmerich film.  Moreover, the inept leadership at the city, state, and national levels before, during, and after the storm seemed otherworldly as well…perhaps from Idiocracy?  These several years later, many people still struggle to make sense of it all, even those who have returned to their homes and some semblance of a normal life.  At the same time writers and artists struggle to make sense of and recall this terribly tragedy in works of fiction, non-fiction, film, and the visual arts.  Later this month, a new graphic novel, A.D.:  New Orleans After the Deluge by Josh Neufeld, will introduce another art form into the conversation. [Read more]

(Un)Funny People

In his only talking role in The Unholy Three , silent film star Lon Chaney plays a ventriloquist-turned-crook who takes the fall for a crime that he didn’t commit so that the woman he loves can be with the man that she loves.  As they part, he tells her, “That’s all there is to life, a little laugh…a little tear.”  Judd Apatow’s latest film, Funny People, complicates this mantra, but not in a good way. [Read more]