Faith on View

Great power, great responsibility, and a way home

Spider-Man rose like the Phoenix from the pages of a dying comic, Amazing Adult Fantasy, which ran as an anthology published by Marvel Comics in 1961 and 1962. As the series neared its run in …

A Gremlin wears a Santa hat and sits at a piano keyboard.

Ghostly apparitions glide as easily into the Christmas season as they do Halloween. In fact, the traditional association of frightening morality tales with the holiday season stretches at least as far back as the seventeenth …

Bruce Willis is shown crawling in an air duct wearing a Santa hat in the movie Die Hard.

Die Hard ranks among my all-time favorite Christmas movies. But before you spit out your eggnog in protest while directing a choice “Yippee ki yay” my way, the film’s director John McTiernan supports my position …

a man with a beard and longer hair wearing a white tunic extends his hand with a hole in the palm toward the viewer

So why is it so hard to make a good Jesus movie? After all, the story of Jesus is the greatest story ever told. Why is it so hard to make a good story out …

Mike Flanagan’s Netflix series Midnight Mass presents a chilling allegory on faith, fanaticism, forgiveness, family, and friendship. Spoilers follow, so beware if you haven’t seen all seven episodes yet. If you haven’t, I highly recommend …

Title: Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted A Faith and Fractured A Nation Author: Kristin Kobes Du Mez Publisher: Liveright Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted A …

The un-profound Christian Movie This is a subject I have thought about many times over the years. Sometimes, it will be because I just saw a sentimental Christian movie claiming profundity. Other times, it is …

I made a mistake. I read the review of The Martian by my friend Collin Garbarino, “Politics and Religion in Ridley Scott’s The Martian.” It is a good review and touches on some of the same …

Spoilers to follow… At the very beginning of the movie, text tells the viewer that the word Sicario is spanish for assassin but has its roots in the Jewish Zealots who were fighting to expel the …

Rondall, Pamela, and the kids in a fall 2014 portrait

A little while back I had a fan of Faith on View message me on Facebook asking me to once again post regularly on Faith on View. Okay, truth be told it really was more of an internet friend teasing me for my failures. For those who follow this blog, they noticed that in September posts stopped fairly abruptly. What happened was that I had the wonderful opportunity to become a Senior Lecturer at California College of the Arts which is one of the top Art Schools in the nation. But, I had previously committed to teaching two classes at William Jessup University, an evangelical school in the Sacramento area, and a class at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, where I am pursuing my PhD. This meant that in addition to the Theological Aesthetics course I was auditing from the esteemed Frank Birch Brown, I was also now teaching five classes at three different institutions. All that to say I was really busy and I let my writing on Faith on View slip. The good news is that this semester my teaching is reduced and I am only teaching one course at GTU and one at CCA. This should translate into more regular writing from me. I have a lot of ideas so I am looking forward to having more time to get them on “paper.”