Sacred Matters Magazine
  • Left of Sacred
  • Sacred Guests
  • 7 Sacred Questions
  • Sacrilegious Podcast
  • Holy Archives
  • Sacred Story

Tag Archives: movie

Disney’s Christopher Robin and the Idolatry of Work

August 23, 2018 Leave a Comment

Daniel Anderson Tragically, Christopher Robin’s life seemingly proves Adorno’s adage that a “wrong life cannot be lived rightly.”

Continue Reading Disney’s Christopher Robin and the Idolatry of Work

What a Father Learned from Captain Fantastic

January 19, 2017 2 Comments

S. Brent Plate Captain Fantastic has nothing to do with superheroes, or anything “super” for that matter.

Continue Reading What a Father Learned from Captain Fantastic

Candomblé Reconsidered: A Sacred Matters Interview

May 25, 2016 Leave a Comment

Dianne Stewart In the twenty-first century, increasing populations are becoming aware of the presence of African-heritage religions in the diaspora but we have still much to learn from and about these religions.

Continue Reading Candomblé Reconsidered: A Sacred Matters Interview

Literary Antecedents and Contemporary Reflections of Thomas Dixon’s “The Clansman”

April 28, 2016 1 Comment

Carolyn M. Jones Medine As The Clansman demonstrates, the Ku Klux Klan was a structure within which white men acted out their vision of southern society and through which they used terror to enforce those visions. The KKK may have been the United States’ first cellular terrorist structure: it was and is covert, local and de-centered, mobile, and opportunistic, multiplying by opportunity and interpersonal connections.

Continue Reading Literary Antecedents and Contemporary Reflections of Thomas Dixon’s “The Clansman”

A Dreadful and Improbable Creature: Race, Aesthetics, and the Burdens of Greatness

April 21, 2016 Leave a Comment
Birth

Judith Weisenfeld The plot of The Birth of a Nation features two intertwined narratives: a political story that moves from national unity to division in war and back to unity, and a romance in which a couple unites despite the obstacles the war presents. The Birth of a Nation is also, of course, a story about the subjugation of people of African descent, a process director D. W. Griffith frames as carried out by honorable white men who had no choice in the face of social chaos.

Continue Reading A Dreadful and Improbable Creature: Race, Aesthetics, and the Burdens of Greatness

Cutting up “The Birth of a Nation”

April 14, 2016 Leave a Comment

S. Brent Plate Cut up D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and it bleeds a little. Rearrange the pieces, as Griffith so expertly cut up film sequences, and put them together in new ways. Splice it into histories, the stories of photography, race, literature, the KKK, bodies, film technique, and it comes out looking different. But it’s gonna bleed. The following articles, are such cuts, such incisive interventions.

Continue Reading Cutting up “The Birth of a Nation”

Birth of the Klan’s Nation

April 12, 2016 1 Comment

Kelly J. Baker At midnight on November 25, 1915, seventeen men climbed to the top of Stone Mountain in Georgia with a large wooden cross. On that Thanksgiving night, they lit the cross on fire and pledged allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, American ideals, and “the tenets of the Christian religion. Read More…

Continue Reading Birth of the Klan’s Nation

Sacred Matters of Coen

March 11, 2016 Leave a Comment
Screen capture from "No Country for Old Men"

Elijah Siegler For years the debate was whether the Coens had any serious background or interest in religion at all. Certainly it was there in their movies—but was religion just one more element in their ironic postmodern mix of genre, American folklore, and popular culture? Religiously minded viewers could have been reading too much into it.

Continue Reading Sacred Matters of Coen

Progressive Priests and Pastors in Recent Popular Media

December 04, 2015 Leave a Comment
Screen Shot- St. Vincent

S. Brent Plate But I am interested in the complexity of human identity, and the ways these complexities allow a variety of practices, beliefs, and behaviors. Simply for the sake of accuracy, it is important to represent diverse channels of human character. Religious identities intersect with sexual, ethnic, racial, gendered, and national identities, and none of these are monolithic. In spite of what we might think based on media representations, not all Christians are conservatives, and not all Christian clergy are narrow-minded, abstaining teetotalers in ignorant servitude to some “Church,” some tradition.

Continue Reading Progressive Priests and Pastors in Recent Popular Media

Hell House

October 29, 2015 Leave a Comment
Sadeler, Hell

Kelly J. Baker I want to go to a Hell House, the evangelical Christian alternative to the ubiquitous haunted houses that pop up every October. I say this almost every year, but I’ve yet to attend one. I’ve only had near misses. When I was in high school in the 1990s, local churches took their youth groups to a Judgement House, the kissing cousin of the Hell House, in Dothan, Alabama. The ride was about 90 minutes round trip, but Judgement House’s message about dangers of the modern world were apparently worth cramming boisterous teens into buses and church vans.

Continue Reading Hell House
1 2 Next →
Follow @SacredMatters

Sacred Matters
@SacredMatters

  • “Female comedians in the Muslim diaspora have been responding to the stereotype of the veil through a “humor of inc… https://t.co/4sjGLUrDsT
    about 1 month ago
  • Thanks for the q&a ⁦@YonatShimron⁩ and ⁦@RNS⁩ https://t.co/p09Hlh9Yxh
    about 1 month ago
  • Tomorrow. Religion. Drugs. Stimulation. #sblaar20 https://t.co/PFucdq8jve
    about 2 months ago
  • “In the subject heading, I wrote: “Death, Drugs, Sex, Religion….”” What a trip. https://t.co/0Xfa00nOdL
    about 2 months ago
  • A brief conversation in which we discuss sacred and not-so-sacred things. With @joerogan https://t.co/A32UbcH4rc
    about 2 months ago

Trending Posts

  • My Joe Rogan Experience, Experience
  • Religious Exoticism and White Utopias: 7 Questions for Amanda J. Lucia
  • Introducing Don’t Think About Death: A Memoir on Mortality
  • Sewing Stories, Sowing Social Justice

Most Popular Posts

  • A Long Strange Trip: Exploring How Yoga-Narasimha Landed on the Grateful Dead’s First Album Cover
  • Mohammed receiving revelation from the angel Gabriel
    Images of Muhammad
  • Fight Church film publicity image
    Jesus Never Tapped Out: A Review of “Fight Church”
  • Taylor Swift GMA
    The Altar of Taylor Swift