Review Essay: Religion Goes to the Movies The Catholic Crusade against the Movies, 1940-1975 Gregory D. Black American Religious and Biblical Spectaculars Gerald E. Forshey Screening the Sacred: Religion, Myth, and Ideology in Popular American Film Joel W. Martin Conrad E. Ostwalt, Jr. Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies Margaret R. Miles Hollywood Dreams and Biblical Stories

Abstract

Film-a.k.a. cinema and movies-occupies a liminal place in the academic pecking order of media. Television is clearly and of academic interest mainly to the cultural studies folk. Literature, though besieged, nevertheless maintains a venerable status within the canon of the liberal arts. Film, however, cuts both ways and, though a product of twentieth-century technology, has generated a sufficient lineage of directors of auteur status-Bergman, Fellini, Griffith, Hitchcock, Renoir-to be deemed worthy of study as art as well as entertainment. Film viewing, together with television, has also emerged as the dominant mode of popular entertainment, with print culture no longer able to claim the uncontestedly privileged status of expression and communication that it enjoyed in the now-bygone era shaped by both Gutenberg and the Protestant reformers. In the academy, the humanities faculty, along with the undergraduate student body, have become enamored with film viewing