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{"id":324,"date":"2014-11-03T16:48:00","date_gmt":"2014-11-03T16:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/11\/toward-a-definition-of-religious-cinema.html"},"modified":"2014-11-03T16:48:00","modified_gmt":"2014-11-03T16:48:00","slug":"toward-a-definition-of-religious-cinema","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/11\/toward-a-definition-of-religious-cinema.html","title":{"rendered":"Toward a Definition of “Religious” Cinema"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

This reflection is provoked by the nagging feeling I\u2019ve had\u2014I suspect you have, too\u2014that there\u2019s a wide gulf between the various definitions of religious moviesthat we\u2019ve been using. But because we\u2019re using the same word, I think we too easily get confused and talk past one another.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s one sense of \u201creligious movie\u201d: a film that self-consciously seeks to boost a particular religion, usually with the intent to evangelize the viewer into joining that religion. Let\u2019s call this Religious, capital R. It\u2019s a movie that is religious by virtue of being of its religion, which almost necessarily is the religion of the filmmaker(s).<\/p>\n

Another sort of religious movie is one that deals with and depicts the specifics of religious practice, the type my friend Mike Leary listed here<\/a> as being of use in the comparative religion classroom. This is a list compiled by someone who knows what he\u2019s talking about, and it includes some marvelous films. But I\u2019m going to leave this out of definitions for now, because I don\u2019t think this is actually what most people mean when they talk about a religious film\u2014perhaps, unfortunately, because we tend to think of religion as a system of organizedbelief, rather than a complicated structure of practice and belief. (But do check out his list<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

So I want to talk about another religious\u2014religious, lowercase r. Lowercase-r religious movies explore, or provoke exploration, of questions that all religions explore. I\u2019m going to do something a little ugly and reframe this in terms of politics to try and explain what I mean.<\/p>\n

Read the rest here<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"