A New Pop Theology Contributor and the Problem of Geeky Authority

Pop Theology is thrilled to welcome its newest contributor, Jason Derr.  Jason has extensively studied creative writing and has an AS in Film/Video Production and an MA in Theological Studies from the Vancouver School of Theology.  He is a theologian-in-affiliation with the Progressive Christian Alliance and has contributed writing to the Canada Lutheran.  Several of his works in short fiction and poetry  have also been published.  Check out his first article, “Doctor Who and The Challenge of Community-Centered Hermenutics,” which examines Doctor Who and the Gospels, after the jump. [Read more]

The Family that Sits Together, Stays Together

A local sports talk radio host frequently comments on the importance of family, arguing that at the end of the day, they’re the only people you can really count on…the only people who’ve been with you from the start.  Of course, this is only one half of the story.  Jonathan Tropper’s most recent novel, This Is Where I Leave You, tells the other half. [Read more]

Screwball Theology

Film and religion professor Terry Lindvall recently alerted me to Theodora Goes Wild (1936), a screwball comedy starring Irene Dunne and Melvyn Douglas.  The DVD also contains another comedy, Together Again (1944), starring Dunne and Charles Boyer.  Both films offer an entertaining dialogue between iconoclastic behavior and conventional social mores, even if the outcomes are conservative and expected. [Read more]

Seriously, God…

It’s hard to talk about the Coen brothers’ most spiritual film, because in one way or another, whether clothed in humor or extreme violence, all of their films speak to the spiritual.  However, their most recent film, A Serious Man, might be their most explicitly spiritual in that the lead character undertakes something of a quest to find spiritual and theological answers to a series of trial and tribulations that beset him. [Read more]

Stardom and Spirituality

This fall, I have been teaching a course entitled Theological Crises and the Development of American Cinema.  It’s a glorified film history course in which we look at the theological implications of cinematic representations of sex, violence, gender, race/ethnicity, and religion.  A couple of weeks ago, I lectured on the Hollywood studio system that thrived through the late 20s and into the 50s.  One key component of this system was what film historian Jeanine Bassinger calls the “star machine.”  Hollywood manufactured, literally, movie stars out of the raw material, actors, available to them.  Their constructions of beauty, femininity, and masculinity have shaped our pop-culture, collective aesthetic to this day.   Along the way, riches were made, entertainment provided, and lives destroyed.  George Cukor’s A Star is Born (1954) captures all this and more. [Read more]

Anticipating Antichrist

Lars von Trier’s Antichrist is one of the few films that I really want to see this Fall.  Film and religion scholar S. Brent Plate wrote about it over the weekend for Religion Dispatches and will write more about it in the coming weeks.  You can find the link to his article after the jump.  What films are you looking forward to this Fall? [Read more]

Standing with the Other

Barrack Obama’s reception of the Nobel Peace Prize pleased, puzzled, and perturbed in equal measure yesterday.  I personally found it an interesting commentary on the state of peacemaking in our world when simple acts of willingness to talk with “the enemy” are considered an extreme, award-worthy stance.  Surely much more is needed in the violently interconnected world in which we find ourselves if we are to make stronger in-roads to peace.  Recently, I have been catching up on season two of HBO’s True Blood.  In the ninth episode, “I Will Rise Up,” we have a scene in which two potential enemies exhibit a much more powerful and peaceful approach to relationships with the other, a stance that might serve as a model for the ways in which we should live as well. [Read more]