This book focuses on debates surrounding the body, soul, and spirit, and addresses other aspects of theological anthropology in service to that angle.What unseen forces govern fictional settings across films, television, and print? Are the bodies they portray useless, evil, spirited, or maybe soulless? This book interrogates the body in examples like Avatar: The Last Airbender, Castlevania, Get Out, Pan's Labyrinth, and Watchmen. While theological anthropology exam...

Scholars have been arguing for years that Star Wars is more than light sabers, Wookies, Millennium Falcons, and troubling familial relationships. Star Wars is an exciting space fantasy that we can explore from multiple academic perspectives, such as philosophy and psychology. This volume adds to that conversation by asking, “what would it look like if we analyzed the Star Wars universe theologically?” In Theology and the Star Wars Universe, contributors from various theological traditions ...

In Theology and the Marvel Universe, fourteen contributors examine theological themes and ideas in the comic books, television shows, and films that make up the grand narrative of the Marvel Universe. Engaging in dialogue with theological thinkers such as Willie James Jennings, Franz Rosenzweig, Søren Kierkegaard, René Girard, Kelly Brown Douglas, and many others, the chapters explore a wide variety of topics, including violence, sacrifice, colonialism, Israeli-Palestinian relations, virtu...

Grounded in Christian principles, this accessible and engaging book offers an informed and fascinating approach to popular culture. William D. Romanowski provides affectionate yet astute analysis of familiar, well-loved movies and television characters from Indiana Jones to Homer Simpson, and he speaks with historical depth and expertise on films from Casablanca to Crash and music from Bruce Springsteen to U2.Romanowski's confessional approach affirms a role for p...

Cult Cinema: an Introduction presents the first in-depth academic examination of all aspects of the field of cult cinema, including audiences, genres, and theoretical perspectives.Represents the first exhaustive introduction to cult cinemaOffers a scholarly treatment of a hotly contested topic at the center of current academic debateCovers audience reactions, aesthetics, genres, theories of cult cinema, as well as historical insights into the topi...

Over the last several decades, comic book superheroes have multiplied and, in the process, become more complicated. In this cutting edge anthology an international roster of contributors offer original research and writing on the contemporary comic book superhero, with occasional journeys into the film and television variation. As superheroes and their stories have grown with the audiences that consume them, their formulas, conventions, and narrative worlds have altered to follow suit, inj...

As the horror subgenre du jour, found footage horror's amateur filmmaking look has made it available to a range of budgets. Surviving by adapting to technological and cultural shifts and popular trends, found footage horror is a successful and surprisingly complex experiment in blurring the lines between quotidian reality and horror's dark and tantalizing fantasies.Found Footage Horror Films explores the subgenre's stylistic, historical and thematic development. I...

Increasingly, thinking Christians are examining the influential role that movies play in our cultural dialogue. Reel Spirituality successfully heightens readers' sensitivity to the theological truths and statements about the human condition expressed through modern cinema. This second edition cites 200 new movies and encourages readers to ponder movie themes that permeate our culture as well as motion pictures that have demonstrated power to shape our perceptions of everything fro...

The connection between theology and film is a hot topic in the academy and the church. But research and writing on methodology and hermeneutics is lacking. This comprehensive collection identifies the overlooked or undervalued areas in the current discussions of film and theology. Including contributions from the leaders in the field, Reframing Theology and Film helps deepen the conversation while bringing it to a new level of prominence. Professors and students of theology and fi...

Religion and cinema share a capacity for world making, ritualizing, mythologizing, and creating sacred time and space. Through cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing, and other production activities, film takes the world “out there” and refashions it. Religion achieves similar ends by setting apart particular objects and periods of time, telling stories, and gathering people together for communal actions and concentrated focus. The result of both cinema and religious practice is a re-creat...

One of the most eclectic and distinctive writers currently working in comics, Grant Morrison (b. 1960) brings the auteurist sensibility of alternative comics and graphic novels to the popular genres-superhero, science fiction, and fantasy-that dominate the American and British comics industries. His comics range from bestsellers featuring the most universally recognized superhero franchises (All-Star Superman, New X-Men, Batman) to more independent, creator-owned...

In this book, Craig Detweiler examines forty-five films from the twenty-first century that resonate theologically--from the Lord of the Rings trilogy to Little Miss Sunshine--offering groundbreaking insight into their scriptural connections and theological applications.Detweiler writes with the eye of a filmmaker, leads Hollywood and religion initiatives at Fuller Seminary, and even came to faith through cinema. In this book, he unpacks the "theology of everyday l...