Chronic Murmuring

RYM 2004

Below is the blurb for the seminar I'm teaching this summer on Christianity and Film. The name of the class is "Christ and Film" and is aimed at Sr. High School Students and the conference will be held in Panama City Beach, Florida. The theme of the conference is hope. My talk should therefore be geared towards that topic, although at present, I'm still constructing the seminar. It will be loosely drawn from things I read in Stan Hauerwas's Community of Character, Johnston's Reel Spirituality, Neihbur's Christ and Culture, and then just more generally, my own thoughts on film. It's mainly going to be, though, a seminar on the importance of stories for Christians, and on looking at Hollywood as the main distributor of stories in our society. I will also talk about a history of the church and hollywood, and talk about the various ways that the church has responded to hollywood in the past. Then, I'm debating about whether to show them a movie or not. Ideally, I think that that is the way to go, since I think a discussion would be a great way to end the week. But each class is only around 50 minutes long, and I'm teaching four of them a day. So I'm not really sure how to fit a movie into it. Still, I'm excited about teaching it. It'll give me the excuse to do some reading on theology and film that I've been wanting to do for a while.

Christ and Film

Arguably, Hollywood is one of the most important cultural institutions in the United States. Each year, several hundred new movies are produced by dozens of different studios. Each year, the number grows. In 2003, over 1.5 billion tickets were sold and nearly $10 billion in revenue was generated from the domestic North American box office alone. Over 500 new films were produced in 2003. But the sheer size of Hollywood doesn’t account for its importance, culturally speaking. Rather, Hollywood is important because Hollywood is our culture’s storyteller, and stories are important because they tell us about ourselves, about life, and ultimately about God.

The theologian Tertullian, an early father of the church, once asked the question, “What’s Athens to do with Jerusalem?” His question was an important one. He was attempting to create a space within which Christians could interact with, yet be secure from, Greek philosophy. In this seminar, we will ask a similar question – what’s Hollywood to do with the Church? Over the past hundred years, Christians have responded to Hollywood in a few different ways. This seminar will hopefully shed some light on the importance of stories in our lives as Christians, the presence of the story of Christ in Hollywood, and the various responses available to Christians in how they think about Hollywood.