Calvin Prof Looks Beyond The Passion

February 23, 2004 == MEDIA ADVISORY

While The Passion of the Christ is set to open this week, debate over the
movie has been going on for months now.

Calvin professor of English Roy Anker thinks that's a good thing. But he's
hopeful too that people, Christians included, will use the discussion about The
Passion to consider broader issues of religion and film.

Anker has written a book about such issues, slated to come out this summer
from Eerdmans.

It's called Catching Light: Looking for God in Film, a 300-page look at a wide
variety of 19 films (everything from The Godfather to Star Wars to American
Beauty) that explore where and how God does (and sometimes does not) show up
amid the usually messy circumstances of life on this earth.
  
It's important, Anker says, to remember that God often shows up in the movies.
 And not only in explicitly Christian films such as The Passion.

"Many films have clear religious elements," he says, "but they're not always
seen as such. The Passion has generated a lot of discussion because it is so
explicitly religious. And the Jewish dimensions have proved controversial. In
addition churches are seeing the film as a clear opportunity for evangelism.
They are hopeful that a cinematic presentation of the gospels can perhaps do
what churches often fail to do: bring people to Christ.

"But what I find perhaps even more interesting are the movies that are not so
explicit, movies that no church would see as evangelistic, but may, in many
ways, be even more powerful to the unchurched than The Passion."

Anker cites such movies in his new book: films like The Godfather, Chinatown
and The Deer Hunter that, he says, take a close look at the nature of evil and
thus help to show the nature of the light that comes to counter it. There are
also films, he says, that depict such Christian notions of redemption, films
such as Tender Mercies and The Mission. Other films display characters who, to
their great surprise, are ambushed by a wholly unexpected God: Grand Canyon,
American Beauty and Three Colors: Blue.

"And," he says, "some of the most popular films of our time have come as
fairy-tale fantasies: the Star Wars saga, Superman and several of Speilberg's
films. "

Contact Anker at 616-526-6530

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Received on Mon Feb 23 10:39:23 2004