How to Discourage Christian Artists

Over at The Gospel Coalition, Wheaton College president Philip Ryken explores how local churches can cultivate healthier thinking about the arts and encourage parishioners with artistic vocations. He gives a list of common problems that …

Cinema in Modern Life

Caleb Wheeler from The Point magazine interviewed program director Joshua Sikora and others in a new article on the influence of cinema in modern life:

“[Movies] are a way of imprinting time — capturing and preserving …

Scholars on "The Great Gatsby"

Over at The Millions, five English scholars weigh in on Baz Luhrmann’s new film adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, including HBU’s own Doni Wilson:

Doni M. Wilson, Houston Baptist University…

Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance

Nate Marshall writes on Koyaanisqatsi (1982) over at The Examined Life:

It isn’t a narrative drama, it isn’t a fiction, and it’s only reluctantly categorized as a documentary (because it’s not at all a documentary, …

The Crowdsourcing Paradigm Shift

Over at IndieWire, SlamDance Film Festival co-founder Dan Mirvish argues that donating might be better than investing when it comes to film:

In all the fuss over Veronica Mars and Zach Braff, people are getting …

The Warmth of “Parks & Rec”

Matt Zoller Seitz at Vulture on Parks & Recreation:

More than any network sitcom since The Andy Griffith Show, Parks and Rec catches the spirit of Preston Sturges’s small-town comedies (Hail the Conquering Hero, The Miracle …

Are Animated GIFs Cinema?

Landon Palmer of FilmSchoolRejects interacts with an IndieWire piece on GIFs as cinema:

“Popular modes of moving-image distraction on the Internet present a rich paradox for the cinephile: it both signals cinema’s supposed end (the certain …

Art as a Common Gift

Tony Woodlief defends the democratization of art over at Good Letters. This is a great point of discussion for cinema as filmmaking becomes cheaper and more accessible than ever before.

A casual traipse through Tumblr—an …

O Coen Brothers, Where Art God?

Matt Zoller Seitz of Press Play and Jeffrey Overstreet discuss God and the Coen Brothers:

MZS: I want to dig into this a bit more, this sense that bedrock Judeo-Christian concepts inform the Coen brothers’ filmography. …

Exploring Intuition

from Marilynne Robinson’s When I Was a Child I Read Books

For me, at least, writing consists very largely of exploring intuition. A character is really the sense of a character, embodied, attired, and given voice …