Through a Screen Darkly (and the wise watching and using of movies)

Through a Screen Darkly: Looking Closer at Beauty, Truth and Evil in the Movies, by Jeffrey Overstreet is a great book that I highly recommend to anyone who is interetsed in engaging with culture and moving into a dialogue with that culture about the "great things that matter the most."

There were several things that I really liked about the book.

First, Overstreet gives a theological and spiritual framework for watching, interpreting, and engaging with movies/culture. For more than a decade, Overstreet has been a critic, reviewer and columnist. He has thought long and deeply about using this form of culture to engage the culture. He has had to do this because he has been severely criticized by Christians who disagree with his reviews of films.

Second, Overstreet shares how movies have shaped his own spiritual journey by providing images and stories upon which he reflected and from which he learned. He refers to it as a "travelogue of dangerous moviegoing."

Third, Overstreet introduces you to a wide world of movies.  I came up with a list of 36 movies that I want to see. Many of them I have never seen. Others I have, but now I want to watch them again.

Finally, here is a quote from Merton that Overstreet uses:  "Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. The mind that responds to the intellectual and spiritual values that lie hidden in a poem, a painting, or a piece of music, (or movie) discovers a spiritual vitality that lifts it above itself, takes it out of itself, and makes it present to itself on a level of being that it did not know it could ever achieve."

Brian Rice