Lost & Found in the Cathedral of Cinema: A Spiritual Journey

Overstreet (Through a Screen Darkly), a professor of creative writing at Seattle Pacific University, explores in this affecting memoir how movies have shaped his faith. Though he grew up in a strict Baptist church that warned against “worldly preoccupations” (cinema doors were gateways “through which the devil would lure people away from the safety of Christian communities”), he found in trips to the theater new ways of seeing the joys and brokenness of a morally complex world. Among the films discussed are Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, which recalls the biblical command to seek justice for the less privileged and revealed to the author how life “looked like a five-alarm fire through the eyes of a Black American artist,” and Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society, in which the efforts of Robin Williams’s Mr. Keating to mentor his students out of “society’s narrow definition of success” and embrace art and imagination makes him an “imitation of Christ.” Overstreet’s graceful prose amplifies his resonant defense of art as a vehicle through which believers can construct a more flexible, complex, and rewarding relationship with God. Readers will be left with a richer understanding of both film and faith. (May)