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

What if watching movies could be a spiritual discipline? For one film critic, great films became guiding lights -- an escape from fear-based religion into richer experiences of imagination, beauty, community, and faith.

Growing up in a bubble of churches and Christian schools, Jeffrey Overstreet was taught by example to condemn "worldly" art and culture as predatory and poisonous. Yet, the flicker of light from cinema screens proved a temptation too powerful to resist. And what he found there was quite the opposite of what he'd been told: He found God at play in ten thousand theaters. Now, through deeply personal and eye-opening stories, Overstreet invites you to retrace a revelatory journey: from Pinocchio to My Neighbor Totoro, from Disney's Hundred-Acre Wood to The Tree of Life, from The Black Stallion to Blade Runner, from Dead Poets Society and Do the Right Thing to Moonrise Kingdom and Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.

Spoiler! Movies do not burn down Overstreet's faith. Rather, they free him to answer the Scriptures' instruction -- not only to love the world, but to learn from it. Great cinema invites us to hear a holy voice in the beauty of the natural world, and to break away from destructive distortions of Jesus's teaching. Guided by the lights of screens and Scripture, the author of Through a Screen Darkly and the fantasy novel Auralia's Colors testifies of a God who moves in mysterious ways, calling us into a life of courageous creativity.

Recognized in The New Yorker, TIME, The Seattle Times, Image, and Christianity Today for his writing on cinema, Jeffrey Overstreet, an assistant professor Seattle Pacific University, teaches creative writing, English literature, academic writing, and film studies. He earned his BA in English literature and his MFA in creative writing from Seattle Pacific University.