“Movies offer these sorts of unconscious prayerful gestures, only much louder and on a giant screen. If it helps, imagine stained-glass windows along the walls of a theater. It’s no coincidence, after all, that the spaces have similar architecture. The knee-jerk comparison to make is a pejorative one: that both places are designed for worship, the implication being that good people go to church to worship God and bad people go to the movies to worship everything else. There is some truth to this reductive reasoning; certainly the most shallow and exploitative of our movies can direct our desires in self-destructive ways. But I think a more fundamental commonality between sanctuaries and theaters is the notion of focus. In both instances, we’ve set aside our time and our space to gather in community and join our concentration. Often the intention is simply to escape the world (and don’t forget, church serves this function too), but frequently we gather to apply our intellectual, emotional, and artistic prowess toward considering the world and our purpose within it.”
“In bringing together these two practices—theological reflection and film criticism—I’m engaging in what is perhaps best described as a work of cultural refraction. Just as holding a prism against a slit of sunlight reveals a variety of colored beams, this book might help our understanding of both God and the movies to shimmer in a new way.”
“I can offer lament to God, and often do. But sometimes the movies do it for me.”
“Films that function as confessional prayers are, instead, those that capture epiphany moments for their characters: instances when they admit and fully bear the weight of the reality that they themselves are inextricably tied up with the awfulness of the world. It’s when they acknowledge that they’ve messed up because they’re messed up, and that they’re incapable of correcting things on their own.”
“Beneath the broad humor, crude gags, and sharp one-liners often lies an instinctual intelligence. Comedy can capture the truth of the world in a flash.”
“Holy nonsense blows on the fading embers of our soul, bringing it back to glowing life. Or, as Walter puts it in The Muppets: “As long as there are singing frogs and joking bears, the world can’t be such a bad place after all.””
“The types of prayer we’ve been considering have been arranged to follow a creation-fall-redemption- restoration trajectory: the understanding that this world was created good, fell into sin, has been redeemed by Christ’s work on the cross, and now awaits the full return to its original glory.”
“As we watch films, then, let’s enter the theater as we would a sanctuary where a prayer is about to be offered. Let’s listen to the prayer carefully and graciously before we add our own words. Let’s be a congregation, not a censor board. Let’s be open to the possibility that as movie watchers, we’re privileged eavesdroppers on a dialogue between God and the creative beings he made.”