Category: Essay

  • More Than Images: The Power of a Film’s Score

    More Than Images: The Power of a Film’s Score

    Prior to diving into this essay, I feel a need to quantify and qualify the topic. First, I am not a musical expert. My knowledge is limited to having played trumpet in grade school, and messing around with a bass guitar for most of the time period following the end of my trumpeting days. Also,…

  • Musicals and the Soundtrack of Faith

    Musicals and the Soundtrack of Faith

    It was Christmas Day 2014 and my daughter, Cadence, and I were settling into our seats in the theater. Just shy of three years old, her feet dangled above from the too-tall theater seat, excitedly swinging back and forth. “When will it start, Momma?” Her eyes wide with anticipation for her first in-theater movie. The…

  • A Few Thoughts On Using the Force

    A Few Thoughts On Using the Force

    I’d like to open the comments of this article to anyone who wishes to confess that they’ve tried to use the Force. Maybe you haven’t found yourself up-side-down like Luke Skywalker, lifting rocks up and gently moving them through the air. Perhaps you’ve never been able to rearrange the furniture in your living room while…

  • Interview with Greg and Teia Batiansila

    Interview with Greg and Teia Batiansila

    At Cinema Faith, we’re not too fond of Christian movies. Truth flows naturally from good stories, but gets suffocated by an agenda. Sermons are different than stories – Christian filmmakers need to understand the distinction. Today, we’d like to present two that do. Meet Greg and Teia Batiansila, a father-daughter duo reversing the stigma of…

  • The Theology of Artificial Intelligence

    The Theology of Artificial Intelligence

    To begin with I must confess that I am a pastor who is a huge fan of science, especially physics and theoretical future science, which also makes me a pretty big geek on sci-fi movies. Secondly (or fifthly), I’m also incredibly fascinated with the thought of artificial intelligence. That is – the possibility of “robots”…

  • Why Fantasy?

    Why Fantasy?

    Until the last decade or so, good genre films were hard to come by. In the days of video rental stores, the fantasy and science fiction aisles were full of low-budget fare. For every classic like The Dark Crystal or The Empire Strikes Back, there were a dozen B-movies like Krull, The Barbarians, Deathstalker, and…

  • Trauma Follows

    Trauma Follows

    In David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, a young woman named Jay (Maika Monroe) has a sexual encounter with her crush, Hugh (Jake Weary), only to find that he has a dark secret. He is followed by a supernatural force, the titular “It,” and the only way to keep “It” from killing is to pass “It”…

  • The Least of These

    The Least of These

    There are a few seminal films from my childhood. Jurassic Park was a big one. Star Wars definitely left a mark too. But the first one I remember before either of those was The Sandlot. Yet, something more than nostalgia surprised me when I re-watched the film last week. Early on, I found myself tearing…

  • Back to Brokeback Mountain

    Back to Brokeback Mountain

    Personally, I wouldn’t have guessed that things would have moved so fast — not ten years ago. Back then I wasn’t even quite sure where I stood on the issue of gay marriage. Like most thoughtful Christians in their late twenties, I was in a bit of an intellectual and political pickle. There was the…

  • A Postmodern Guide to Absolute Truth

    A Postmodern Guide to Absolute Truth

    A few weeks ago, I had a revelation. Age of Ultron just hit theaters as I hit the road for a friend’s wedding, and I found myself discussing the film with some Christians outside my normal circle. Excitedly, I shared my take on the similarities between superhero movies and the Gospel, and why I thought…