Abstract
Adolescents are bombarded during most of their waking hours by images on various screens: computer, television, and film. As so-called digital natives, they are aware that these images are manufactured and manipulated to elicit certain responses. But while they acknowledge the artificiality of those images, they allow the same mediated messages virtually unfettered access to their hearts and minds with sad or even chilling results. Catholic educators and pastoral workers are charged with helping young people navigate the terrain created by popular media for at least two reasons: to nurture a more sophisticated approach to reading media, and to leverage Catholicism’s long history of employing art to illuminate aspects of God and the transcendent. The endeavor described in this article posits that the Great Commandment (Matthew 12:28-31), to love God and love one’s neighbor as oneself, provides an intellectual and pastoral framework for using recent popular films to sharpen media literacy skills on the one hand and to cultivate a sacramental imagination on the other, using tools that are portable to multiple disciplines and to most new films.
Highlights
Adolescents are bombarded during most of their waking hours by images on various screens: computer, television, and film
The endeavor described in this article posits that the Great Commandment (Matthew 12:28-31), to love God and love one’s neighbor as oneself, provides an intellectual and pastoral framework for using recent popular films to sharpen media literacy skills on the one hand and to cultivate a sacramental imagination on the other, using tools that are portable to multiple disciplines and to most new films
In an era of shrinking financial resources and steady, warranted exhortations to demonstrate the “value-added” of an expensive Catholic college education, this film series offers a replicable strategy to work toward attaining that goal
Summary
The film series presented in this article equips young adult viewers to see themes of grace, redemption, and transcendence in movies as disparate—and as far from explicitly religious—as Kung Fu Panda (Cobb, Stevenson, & Osborne, 2008), The Dark Knight (Nolan, Roven, & Thomas, 2008), and Scott Pilgrim vs The World (Wright, Platt, Gitter, & Park, 2010) An endeavor such as the “Bringing Eyes of Faith to Film” series affords even teachers and catechists who may not have a substantial academic background in film criticism the intellectual means to cultivate an orientation to movies in young people that is both cognitively rigorous and sacramental. The inclusion of several contextual details should afford readers ample opportunities to consider how this work might be adapted for use in their own contexts
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