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We love to talk movies on the Re-integrate Podcast. Why? Because we want to reintegrate our enjoyment of pop culture with our Christian faith. Our guest on this episode is film critic Josh Larsen. He is co-host of WBEZ (Chicago’s NPR station) radio show Filmspotting, which is also one of the top movie podcasts. Josh is also the editor and producer for Think Christian, a website and podcast exploring faith and pop culture. He’s been writing and speaking about movies professionally since 1994.

We discuss with Josh his two books: Movies Are Prayers: How Films Voice Our Deepest Longings (InterVarsity Press, 2017), and Fear Not!: A Christian Appreciation of Horror Movies (Cascade Books, 2023, a part of Fuller Seminary’s Reel Spirituality Monograph series).

Have you ever had a profound experience while watching a movie? When you were so overwhelmed by emotion that you could call it spiritual? In his book Seeing Is Believing: The Revelation of God Through Film (IVP, 2022), theologian Richard Vance Goodwin argues that such experiences may sometimes be encounters with God. He explores how certain films use various visual strategies to invite viewers to feel emotions that may open them up to God’s presence.

Dr. Richard Goodwin is adjunct assistant professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary. He is also Academic Director of Teaching and Learning at Pathways College of Bible and Mission in New Zealand.

How is art an inroad to our experience of God? How does making things give us a more tangible knowledge of the love of God and the joy of being a human in God’s image? What role do imagination and creativity have in a full-orbed theology? Our guest has some profound thoughts on these things. We are deeply honored to have renowned artist Makoto Fujimura on this episode of the Reintegrate Podcast. 

Mako Fujimura is a leading contemporary artist in what is called the “slow art” movement. As a Japanese-American, he studied art at Bucknell University and then studied traditional Japanese painting in the doctorate program at the Tokyo University of the Arts. His art is a fusion of fine art and abstract expressionism utilizing the techniques of ancient traditional Japanese art. His art has been featured widely in galleries and museums around the world including collections in The Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, The Huntington Library, and the Tikotin Museum in Israel. 

His latest book is Art and Faith: A Theology of Making (Yale University Press, with a foreword by N.T. Wright, 2021).

The Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper famously said these words in a speech he gave when he opened a new university:

“There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!”

Jessica Joustra and Robert Joustra are the editors of a new book titled Calvinism for a Secular Age: A Twenty-First-Century Reading of Abraham Kuyper’s Stone Lectures (IVP, 2022). It’s a book that features contemporary Christian theologians, historians, scientists, and artists applying to today the concepts Kuyper introduced to America in 1898 in his famous Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary. These lectures, reflecting on the role of the Christian faith in a variety of social spheres, emphasized that our Christian faith addresses every aspect of life. This book seeks to bring those concepts into the 21st Century.

How does our faith inform our public life? We know it addresses our personal lives, our personal holiness, our families, our churches. But does our faith inform our work? Our enjoyment of art? Of fashion? Of architecture? Instead of simply relying on the political pundits on the cable news channels, do we have access to theologically shaped ideas to issues like political ideologies, immigration, race relations, and economics? 

Our guest on this episode of the Reintegrate Podcast is Dr. Matthew Kaemingk. He is the Richard John Mouw Assistant Professor of Faith and Public Life at Fuller Theological Seminary where he also serves as the Director of the Richard John Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life. His research and teaching focus on marketplace theology, Islam and political ethics, and public theology.

His latest publication is a book he edited as a festschrift to honor the life and work of Richard Mouw, Reformed Public Theology (Baker Academic, 2021).

We can go to the movies to just be entertained or escape for a couple of hours, or we can look closer and dig deeper. What do the stories and characters in today’s movies tell us about the human condition? How can art teach us things that God wants us to grasp that we may not understand in any other way? Dr. Craig Detweiler (MFA, University of Southern California’s School of Cinema/TV and Ph.D. in Theology and Culture, Fuller Theological Seminary) has thought and wrote about these things for years and helps Bob and Brendan to wrestle with the messages of many of today’s best movies. Craig is the author of several books on Christian theology as it relates to pop culture, including his latest, Deep Focus: Film and Theology in Dialogue, co-written with Robert K. Johnston and Kutter Callaway.