Taking Your Faith to the Movies – with Craig Detweiler

How do we reintegrate the Christian faith with how we watch movies? We can go to the movies to just be entertained or escape for a couple hours, or we can look closer and dig deeper. What do the stories and characters in today’s movies tell us about the human condition? How can art teach us things that God wants us to grasp that we may not understand in any other way?

Dr. Craig Detweiler (MFA, University of Southern California’s School of Cinema/TV and Ph.D. in Theology and Culture, Fuller Theological Seminary) has thought and wrote about these things for years and helps Bob and Brendan to wrestle with the messages of many of today’s best movies.

Movies Discussed in this Podcast:

• The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

• Mean Streets (1973)

• Silence (2016)

• The Tree of Life (2011)

• The Witch (2015)

• A Quiet Place (2018)

• Get Out (2017)

• The Invisible Man (2020)

• Black Panther (2018)

• 42 (2013)

• Da 5 Bloods (2020)

• Lady Bird (2017)

• Little Women (2019)

• The Vast of Night (2019)

• Palm Springs (2020)

• Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

• Arrival (2016)

• Les Misérables (2019)

• Snowpiercer (2013)

• Parasite (2019)

• Shoplifters (2018)

• Moonlight (2016)

Craig Detweiler is a filmmaker and author. He has written or co-written many books on Christian engagement with pop culture, media, and technology. Check them out:

Selfies: Searching for the Image of God in a Digital Age

iGods: How Technology Shapes Our Spiritual And Social Lives

Halos and Avatars: Playing Video Games with God

Into the Dark: Seeing the Sacred in the Top Films of the 21st Century

A Matrix of Meanings: Finding God in Pop Culture

Deep Focus: Film and Theology in Dialogue

Purchase these books from independent booksellers Beth and Byron Borger at Hearts and Minds Bookstore!

Craig’s cultural commentary has been featured on ABC’s Nightline, CNN, NPR, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He’s served as a professor at Biola University, Pepperdine University, and Fuller Seminary (where Bob took a class from him on a theology of pop culture for his doctoral degree). 

Craig is the co-founder of the Windrider Forum, an approved and sanctioned event that takes place during the Sundance Film Festival. Windrider is an immersive experience for 200 students from 25 Christian universities and seminaries and leaders from film, media, business, academia, ministry, and journalism. They invite Sundance’s cutting-edge filmmakers into the Windrider Forum, where Craig leads a Q&A time with them to honor their craft, listen to their stories, and find thoughtful, spiritual themes in their work.

Thanks for listening!

Go to https://www.re-integrate.org/ for years’ worth of articles on reintegrating your callings with God’s mission, resources for further learning, links to the Reintegrate YouTube channel, and more.

On Reintegrate’s podcast page, you’ll find ways to email us or call us to comment on this podcast. https://www.re-integrate.org/reintegrate-podcast/

If you like this podcast, please subscribe and write a quick review at Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app to encourage others to listen too!