Cinema and Religion Essay -- Religious Religion Culture Essays

Cinema and ReligionEntertainment media are impart to the emergence of new and novel forms of spiritual and spectral phenomena in our present-day(a) (and past) finish. The essays in this issue explore diverse facets of the morphing relationship between entertainment, church building property and culture. Over the last century, the photographic film has played a vital lineament in the expression and representation of Judeo-Christian religious practices and beliefs. Early cinema told the life of Christ in the Passion Play and Cecil B DeMille produced dickens spectacular versions of The Ten Commandments in 1923 and 1956. While cinema represented religious themes and get intos, religious institutions also shaped the emergence of this moving externalize engineering and its role within Western society the wondrous moving image provided by the cinematrographe could open the viewers eyes to the work of idol or, somewhat paradoxically, do the Devils work by deceiving them with its i llusionary spectacles.Two world-shaking changes in this relationship between cinema and religion are occurring in our Post-millennial era. Firstly, the cinema is now participant in a complex audio-visual and textual culture that includes both established and emerging media a Multiverse created from computer games, rum books, television programs, theme parks, virtual reality technologies and other new media. Secondly, traditional forms of religious practices and spiritual beliefs are shifting from their familiar locations in the church and community. Once, the cinema was seen as analogous to the Church because it provided a sacred outer space of worship. Now, however, the theme park, the computer game and cyberspace are the realms for an emerging Post-Millennial spirituality. We remove to... ...rent media that shape and inform the fantastic and the spiritual in Western culture from Francis I, C16th King of France who, reflecting a nascent version of the media star, constructed h imself as a figure of worship to the landscapes of Stephen King story worlds that present the reader with uncanny, Gothic spaces and storey scenarios that question the normality of everyday reality to the transcendental pursuits of the wizard(prenominal)ian and magic lantern technology or the worship-like experiences inherent to fan cultures. We are living in an era where cultural identities, beliefs, forms of religious community, models of consciousness and what it means to be world are being transfigured. In the light of this transfiguration this issue of resolute considers the relationship between media, religion, and the fantastic and the every day and the sacred and the uncanny.