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Since 1900, the Christian Century has published reporting, commentary, poetry, and essays on the role of faith in a pluralistic society.
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Episode 26: Saved!
Adam and Matt talk with Bromleigh McCleneghan about sex, community, and purity culture after watching the movie Saved! (2004).
Improvising the music of daily life
Robert Bresson’s films are adventurous, brooding, and deeply religious.
by Jon Sweeney
2014 has been described as the year that Hollywood found faith. But if the first-ever panel on faith and film at the Sundance Film Festival is any indication, the discovery of theological depth is still quite a ways off.
Lars and the Real Girl shows the power of the visual medium to tell a theological story. I not only felt that I knew Lars, but that I knew myself through his fear of the tangles of relationship, his anxiety about the need to be transformed, and his desire to put transformation off as long as possible.
by Amy Frykholm
Cinema has long been a critical medium for exploring religious themes in mainstream culture. Today, filmmakers continue to find a distinctive religious voice.
Most Christians have not been encouraged to think theologically about divine encounters that take place outside the church and its scripture.
As part of the astonishing cinema boom known as Nollywood, some 300 Nigerian producers churn out around 2,000 films each year. Their market of almost 150 million people makes this the world’s third-largest film industry, after Hollywood and the Indian Bollywood. The films go straight to DVD or VCD and sell hundreds of thousands of copies in Nigeria alone, not to mention circulation among the Nigerian disapora in North America and Western Europe. Because videos are passed on from hand to hand, actual viewership is impossible to determine. Explicitly Christian videos make up a large part of the output, which is not surprising when we realize that perhaps 45 percent of Nigerians follow this faith.