Mythic Thinking

I saw Inception a week ago. I’ve been trying to let it percolate, not because it’s a bad movie so much as it did leave me thinking. I have many friends who had to see it more than once to make sense of it. A few others who have made their own sense of it. And at least one whose response was “give me a break” (in not so many… Continue reading

This is my write-up from the talk I gave at Infinitus 2010. Please feel free to leave comments. I’m going to turn it into an actual essay, and would like feedback. Continue reading

The Con is coming to an end, which means I’m taking it easy tonight and packing and leaving bright and early tomorrow. I’m going to post the transcript for my talk when I get home, but in the mean time, I thought I’d wrap up the Con. This is really just an excuse to post the pictures I took of the Park.

The Con itself is a little disappointing. There… Continue reading

I’m presenting this summer at Infinitus, a HPEF Harry Potter fan conference. I really enjoy presenting at the HPEF events, because they’re an opportunity to be a stuffy academic without the stuffy academic environment. For example, you can sit through several serious presentations about Harry Potter and things like education, religion, or literature studies, then at lunch go watch a live water Quidditch match or Wizard Chess. I’ve only every attended HPEF conferences, but they’re not the only ones available each year, but I think they were the first organization to offer the conferences. Continue reading

An un-exciting list of the sources used in the Jesus in Cinema essay. Nothing to see here. Move along. Continue reading

So what does Jesus symbolize? It is too difficult to separate the myth from the man and find a coherent symbol. It is too easy to confuse the fact that Jesus was crucified as a martyr and overlook the political unrest he was stirring among the Jewish people. The Romans and the Pharisees both wanted to eliminate him from the competition because he posed a threat to their power. Kazantzakis… Continue reading

Tortured Jesus

Perhaps it is because I watched this movie for the first time after numerous viewings of Life of Brian and Jesus Christ Superstar, but I really was unimpressed by The Passion of the Christ. Gibson’s recreation of the Passion reflects more of a sensationalist, borderline propaganda piece showing the events surrounding the crucifixion of Christ. Based on the… Continue reading

Incarnations of Jesus

Jésus de Montréal (Jesus of Montreal) is another movie that attempts to revision Jesus without actually being about Jesus. Like Dogma, this film approaches the question of faith. Daniel Colombe is an avant-garde actor who is hired by a church to stage the Stations of the Cross, yet to… Continue reading

In honor of Holy Week and Easter 2010, I thought I would share a paper that looks at the images of Jesus in modern cinema. “The image of Jesus shifts with every generation, according to the time period, and symbolizes the image of God the Father as a reminder of humanity’s relationship with the divine, becoming the image needed by the cultural unconscious to communicate a particular archetype. I read the Gospels for the first time for this class, and initially found myself quite angry. Reading the Gospels fully debunked the image of Jesus I had developed through the liturgical teachings of my Episcopal upbringing. Furthermore,” Continue reading

An un-exciting list of the sources used in the Sistine Chapel essay. Nothing to see here. Move along. Continue reading