Popcorn Theology Begins!

Seungrok and I are excited about our summer series “Popcorn Theology” and the way we look at stories in our world. I took a class in seminary called “Christ and Culture” with Rev. Dr Brandon Scott. Brandon asserted that the moral learning in our country had for many years come from reading books. Books helped shape our identity and caused us to consider other ways of seeing things in our world. He talked about the power of books to shape us as a country and a people. Those that are fighting to ban books would agree with this argument and they are trying to control what we read because they recognize the power of the story. But Brandon had decided that this was no longer true.

In our class he argued that movies are what is shaping our understanding about morality. We had to watch 35 movies over the course of the semester, discuss them and even write papers about them. Each time he offered the class, he focused on a different director’s work. The year that I took the class we were considering Clint Eastwood’s body of work.

As you can imagine, we watched a lot of religious movies and the way the Jesus was depicted. We also watched movies that were not religious but spoke to the morality of our culture. Some of the movies were bizarre and others moved me deeply. We watched the evolution of Clint Eastwood move from spaghetti westerns full of redemptive and “justified” violence to Grand Torino where the hero gives his life to save others. Sound familiar?

I haven’t thought about that class in a long time but now that we are considering how the stories of the Bible would be depicted in movies, it has been on my mind a lot. People say that the Bible is boring but I would argue that they must not have ever read it because it is a roller coaster of stories. Some of those stories are horrifying and others deeply moving. The Bible inspires us and challenges us. It guides our lives and even makes us angry. For the next 5 weeks, we will be looking at the classic movie genre’s and the stories in the Bible that fit these classifications. We start this Sunday with the military action movie genre. I hope you will join us.

I love you and God loves you,