Ep. 424 Jeffrey Overstreet - What a Darkened Theater Can Teach About Seeing God Clearly

Light is a language, and learning to read it - in a darkened theater, in the stories of your neighbors, in the films you were told to avoid - helps us see clearly. In this conversation, Jeffrey Overstreet and I talk about cinema as a spiritual practice, what it looks like to love your neighbor by actually watching their films, why the filmmakers he was told to fear have shaped his faith far more than he was told they would, and why pursuing truth and beauty on the big screen has a way of leading us back to Jesus.

Jeffrey Overstreet is the author of two film-focused memoirs—Through a Screen Darkly (2007) and Lost and Found in the Cathedral of Cinema (2026)—and the four-volume fantasy series The Auralia Thread. He has served as Senior Film Critic at Christianity Today, a film columnist for the literary arts journal Image, and has been published at Paste and Bright Wall/Dark Room. In 2024, students at Seattle Pacific University voted him Undergraduate Professor of the Year for his work teaching creative writing and film studies. You can find more than 25 years of his writing on film, music, and faith at JeffreyOverstreet.com

Jeffrey's Book:

Lost and Found in the Cathedral of Cinema

Jeffrey's Recommendations:

Scott Cairns

Tania Runyan

Delicate Machinery Suspended

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Transcript

Jeffrey Overstreet: 0:00

When I started pursuing and prioritizing truth and beauty at the movies, I kept finding myself arriving within Jesus' teaching, within Jesus' example, within the world, as Jesus revealed it to us. But what I left behind was not Jesus, but a very distorted version of Jesus, a stained glass version of Jesus that did not move me, but made me feel small and judged.

Joshua Johnson: 0:40

Hello and welcome to the shift in culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, you know, light is a language. That's what Jeffrey Overstreet has come to believe after a lifetime of watching films, teaching them and writing about them and learning to read that language in a darkened theater, in the face of a stranger, in a story told by someone whose culture you were taught to fear is what it means to grow in faith. Jeffrey is a film critic, author and professor at Seattle Pacific University who has spent over 25 years writing at this intersection of cinema and faith and the imagination. His new book, Lawson found in the Cathedral of cinema, is a spiritual memoir told through film, and it is one of my favorite books I've read in a long time. I sit down with Jeffrey to talk about what cinema has taught him about seeing clearly, why the filmmakers he was told to avoid have shaped his faith more than most of what he found inside the church and what it looks like to follow the light even when it leads you somewhere you never expected to go. So join us into the Cathedral of cinema. Here is my conversation with Jeffrey Overstreet. Jeffrey, welcome to shifting culture. Excited to have you on. Thank you so much for joining me.

Jeffrey Overstreet: 2:02

What a privilege to be here on a show that looking at your guest list from recent years, I can't believe I've been missing my friends have been holding out on me this. This is their best kept secret.

Joshua Johnson: 2:14

Well, yeah, you should chastise your friends, because they should. They should have let you know about the show so clearly you could listen, and you could have been on earlier, but really excited to talk to you about your your notebook, Lost and Found in the Cathedral of cinema. It's a spiritual journey, some of my favorite type of writing. It's a spiritual memoir through film. And I really, really love this book, and so excited to dive in. And I want to just start with, with light, you have some pretty spectacular just ruminations on light as you're sitting in, in mass, as you're you're like looking at film, there's like flickers of light everywhere. I think you end the book around light as well. What? What is it about light that has really shaped some of your your journey? Why is it fascinating to you?

Jeffrey Overstreet: 3:11

That's a that's a question that goes, goes way back. I mean, I remember being fascinated with light as a kid, even outside the context of movies. My family was really into Fourth of July fireworks shows. We were I remember going up to Fort Vancouver, just north of Portland, Oregon, to watch fireworks. And I was just in awe of that. We did not go to the movies as a family. We went to things that were free as a family. So I remember driving down to the Portland airport on on Friday nights, sometimes just for the light show, when we would park the car as a family, we would park the family car at the end of the runway, and the passenger planes would fly right over us. And I'm pretty sure that's what prepared me to be a huge fan of Steven Spielberg's close encounters with a third kind because of those, just the incredible light show flying right over you, and then you'd feel the the heat and the wind of the airplane. But there wasn't a lot of big screen experience in my childhood. My parents took me to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs when Disney's classic came back around. And that was my first experience with the big screen. And gave me an appetite for it, and then I wouldn't leave them alone about it. So they took me to something much more grown up. They took me to see the Muppet, the Muppet Movie. From that point on, I didn't just want to see the bright screen. I wanted to be involved in it. And so I went to work, you know, drawing characters and writing my own stories and creating puppet shows and trying to figure out how I could be a part of all this. But also, I mean, if I think about something like just, just the Christmas season, light is what I think of first, my my favorite Christmas memory has nothing to do with opening gifts. It has to do with coming home from the crowded family gatherings and lying on the couch just wide awake, buzzing with all of the. Excitement of the season, and just lying there watching strange shapes on the ceiling as the flickering Christmas lights on the tree cast these strange shadows all over the room, that's a powerful there's a powerful sense of mystery and beauty in that that spoke to me on some level, and I think from a very early age, I was just attuned, not just to the power of story. You know, I was a big reader as a kid, because, again, we didn't go to the movies. So to escape, I read. I read all kinds of things, but the power of light, and how in a moment, just a flicker of light on a wall can can resonate with you, with this sense that there might be more. You know the great Shakespeare line about it, there may be more going on in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy. Right Light has a way of awakening something in us to a sense that there's more going on, that there may be a presence here. And then, if you focus on just how central images of light are throughout the Scriptures, the light of the world, for example, the morning star. I think we're supposed to pay attention to that. I think light is a language. And so when, when you then step into the the arena of movies, filmmakers, who know what they are doing are not just paying attention to what's in front of the camera, but they're paying attention to light and how that reveals what's in front of the camera. The light is as much an element of their artistry as their actors or their screenplay. You usually can tell a filmmaker who is an artist when you find yourself paying attention to the quality of images as much as the story. And you can have, I mean, that's what's fundamental to cinema, right? You can have a movie that doesn't have a narrative, but you can't you can have a movie that doesn't have sound, but you can't have a movie that doesn't have images so it doesn't have light. And so the more I pay attention to that, the more I find my mind moving in the direction of the things of the Spirit and questions about how God moves and and exists and illuminates in the world.

Joshua Johnson: 7:08

As you're paying attention to the light in cinema and on the big screen in your life, what shifted over time in your journey, in your spiritual journey of seeing something more expansive. Did paying attention to light expand some of your binaries, your dogma that you inherited growing up? Did that do anything to open your mind to enter into some of mystery and beauty.

Jeffrey Overstreet: 7:41

I think that light suggests the metaphor of illumination, of seeing clearly. And I and I wanted to see clearly. I mean, one of the first you know, I grew up in Christian education, in Christian elementary schools, middle schools, high schools in Portland, where my father taught at Portland Christian schools and was one of the founding faculty members there. My uncle taught mathematics and computer science there. And so Bible memorization was a big part of my education. And one of the first verses we paid attention to and we memorized and became central to our to the focus of Christian education there was, of course, Philippians, four, eight, whatever is true, whatever is beautiful, whatever is honorable. I'm not quite getting it exactly right now, whatever is worthy of praise. Let your mind dwell on these things. And so I went looking for illumination. I went looking for the wisdom of teachers and of writers and of artists who wanted to show me things as much or more than to tell me things when you grow up in an evangelical tradition, when you grow up in Protestant churches especially, I'm making broad generalizations here, but in my experience, in Protestant churches, there was Always a focus on the lesson. You know, a sermon was a lesson. A story was told. So you would arrive at a lesson. But I was drawn more and more when I would get home from church on Sunday morning, I wanted to run to my my room and put on my Disney Records or look at picture books. That was where the action was, so to speak, that's where things were really happening that intrigued me. There was a fuller sense of experience. Things weren't just boiled down to a paraphrase. I sort of had this almost an allergic reaction to the moment when someone would say the moral of the story is, because that was like, you know, that's not what I'm here for. I'm not saying it's not important, but I'm I'm here for the sensory experience of something. So I would put on those Disney Records, and I would hear, hear the songs and the sound effects and the narration and the voices, and I would long to see the images that. But in many cases, I was not allowed to see because I was growing up in a community that was highly suspicious of quote, unquote worldly media. Movies were viewed primarily as toxic and a corrupting influence of that. That's where you would see and somehow be immediately contaminated by the evils of the world. And if you saw a fellow Christian coming out of a movie theater, you were very concerned, and should probably pray for them. I was looking at all of this Disney stuff that was, you know, ubiquitous, inescapable for children in the in the 70s and the 80s, wanting to see the source, wanting to see what was generating all of this excitement. And when I watched something like that, it would occur to me, you know, in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, or in I have a whole chapter in the book Lost and Found in the Cathedral of cinema, a whole chapter about the formative influence of Disney's The many adventures of Winnie the Pooh for me, as I was so drawn to those illustrations, to those characters, to the brilliant voice casting, to the way it brought to life a whole world that I wanted to be a part of. And so let me get let me give an example, the many adventures of Winnie the Pooh would play on television, on Sunday nights, on this show called The Wonderful World of Disney. They would show excerpts from it. That's a movie with three short stories based on the AA Milne classics. And so I would eventually see those three disparate pieces that would eventually be fused into one feature film, the many adventures of Winnie the Pooh. And since that was a children's story, and it was fairly safe, and those books were beloved in Christian families. I was allowed to watch that, and I remember Winnie the Pooh and the blustery day watching this wonderful community of animals that were had such distinct voices, such distinct personalities, and then a storm comes through, right? A blustery day comes through and it wrecks the order of the 100 Acre Wood poor owl in his tree house, his the tree comes down, the house is destroyed, and little six or seven year old Jeff is sitting there glued to the screen, watching images of things he recognizes and loves break apart. And that is stirring things up in me, because that represents to me what I have been very carefully protected from any vision of a world gone wrong. And yet something resonates in me about that the light is disrupted, the light is disordered. How is how am I supposed to respond to this? How am I supposed to make sense of this? And then, while my instinct would be, I want to see it go back together again. What happens is, not that at all. What happens is a particular character, if you know the story, you know it's Piglet, ends up making a meaningful sacrifice. Eeyore comes along and says, I've found owl a house. And they all, they all follow Eeyore to see this house that he has found for for owl. And Eeyore, being something of an idiot, leads them to piglets house and says, Here it is. Here's a great house. Owl, why don't you move in here? And again, my heart is in my throat. You know, as a child, I'm looking at this going, well, that's not right. That belongs to piglet. This is, this is yet another disruption of the order. And then piglet steps forward and says, Well done, Eeyore, here's your new house. Owl in what what should seem to adult sensibilities, an outrageous, unjust decision to to surrender the house he loves that belonged to his grandfather, to one of his neighbors, as if nothing's happening here. But watch what happens there, in that disruption, in that disorder, an offer of love is made. Then Pooh Bear turns to Piglet and says, Where are you going to live? Piglet, I think you should live with me. And now Winnie the Pooh who let's let's face it, needs companionship. Needs people to be there for him, to keep him from his disordered appetites. And piglet becomes a roommate for poo. Everything in the 100 Acre Wood is not the same. It's not we haven't gone back to when the when the 100 Acre Wood was great again. You know, to make the 100 Acre Wood great again, we are making the 100 Acre Wood new through sacrifice and generosity and grace and love, and now, because of the disruption and because of the loving response to the disruption, you have a new world. And this was coming to life with such color, such personality. It's the quality, and frankly, the light. Right? That is, that is compelling my attention and embedding this movie in my DNA. It's not a like a no offense to the great artists of flannel graph out there, but when I was in Sunday school as a kid, stories were just these stock figures, stock felt figures being moved around on a board to illustrate a story to arrive at the lesson. But this was a world I was invited into to suffer its troubles and see how love can redeem those troubles that stuck with me. It gave me hope. It gave me courage through hard times, and I would then start to see one movie after another, one story after another, one life experience after another, as the blustery day which could be made meaningful, could be redeemed by love and we could end up in a better world on the other side of it, I've had conversations with your former guest, Sean Gaffney about this, one of my dearest Friends and such a such a masterful sort of guru on the art of story, and I agree with him that all story is pointing us to God. If I say that to my students, I see a whole lot of cringing, and a whole lot of people like wanting to flee the room. And that's when I have to say, if you're uncomfortable with this claim that all story is about God. Try this instead. Substitute that with truth or love and see how you feel about that. Because I don't think there's anybody here in the room who will flee the room at the idea of truth or love, and that's what I'm talking about when I talk about God. So right there with Sean Gaffney, if only to slightly tweak what he's saying and say, for the benefit of everybody here, let's say that all story is pointing us in the direction of love.

Joshua Johnson: 16:48

I would love to then say that all story is pointing us the direction of love. But I think maybe some of your students, as they enter into your class before you've wrestled with some of these things and Christians growing up, they they don't believe that all stories are leading us to love, that there are stories that are leading us away from from that. So how do we help people? Or how can we just start to ingest story and receive the gift of what the story is, and then start to actually pay attention to what it's trying to say, and say, is it leading to love? Is it not leading to love? Or how can it like, what does it look like for us to engage movies, engage story in a way that doesn't just dismiss it, but it actually helps us engage what it is in a in a real way.

Jeffrey Overstreet: 17:49

Well, I would never claim that all stories are are doing this. I would say all good stories. I mean, if I go back to the the Philippians, four, eight verse, whatever is, whatever rings true, you know, whatever seems honorable, whatever is worthy of praise. But I would also say, though, that all stories, all good storytelling, comes from a place of needing to express something true. And often storytellers will cop out, and, you know, offer us a vision of a resolution of that, or a response to trouble that I think is unwise, but I would also say that those stories probably don't resonate. If they do, it's probably part of the story that's resonating, and that's what we then pay attention to. You know, discernment is central to this right. We need to listen to what's being presented to us and weigh it with our intellect and our conscience. There's a There's a scripture verse that is probably printed somewhere on some building or some placard or something on every Christian college campus, you know, and it's be transformed by the renewing of your mind, right? And in the book, I talk about how the poet Scott Cairns, one of one of my mentors and real heroes in art making and in discernment, talks about how that verse has been badly translated. I'm not sure college campuses would have it all over the place if they knew that be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Is a mistranslation of the Greek, which originally said, I'm paraphrasing, Be transformed by the renewing of your something we don't have a word for in the English language. The word in Greek is nous, N, O, U, S, and what that means is a it's actually a physical place in the body. It's at the back of the throat, but it represents a capacity for thinking and feeling and having your intuition and your intellect work things out together. So when you are moved by something, you feel it in the back of your throat. You feel the famous lump in your throat, right that. Is deeply connected to the fact that you are thinking and you are feeling, if we just rely on our intellects, when we look at each other, when we look at the world, when we look at stories or art or movies, we are likely to be misled, because if you just operate rationally, you're going to end up making decisions that hurt people. You're not able to take grace into account. If you just rely on your heart or your intuition, you are likely to be led by impulsive emotions that need to be stabilized, need to be guided, need to be advised. When I have made decisions that are primarily emotional, I've gotten myself in trouble, Be transformed by the renewing of your noose, where these things are meant to work things out together, in dialog, in collaboration. So you go to a movie, let's just say, I just went and saw it. Was just an accident. The Oscar nominated film by Jafar Panahi, the great Iranian filmmaker. By the way, this is a great time for us to be paying attention to art coming out of Iran. I walked into that theater thinking about the voices from my childhood. That would have been like, alarmist. Would have been like, why are you going to go watch this? They don't believe what we believe. Their culture is different from ours. Their priority is different from ours. Don't you know that? You know, haven't you been paying attention to the terrorism around the world? Haven't you been paying attention to the nature of their government? I go into that movie and I say, these are my neighbors. These are my neighbors that I am called to love. And if I am to love my neighbor, I need to listen to my neighbor. So let me hear the story this neighbor has to tell and what I get is a story about a community of people who were once political prisoners, who were tortured, and now they are trying to move on from that trauma and and live as neighbors and his citizens, and one of them stumbles onto the guy that he thinks was their torturer, so he throws him in the back of a van, and he calls his friends together and says, What are we going to do about this? This is our chance to get this guy back. And you've got people on the team who want to kill him. You've got people on the team who want to torture him. You've got people on the team who want to go after his family. You have others who are advising restraint, saying you don't know the fires you are going to restart and the new fires you're going to start if you commit violence here. And it becomes a story about, are we going to stoop to the level of our violent enemies to respond to them? And it becomes a challenge on the matter of conscience and grace, and I'm sitting there thinking this is as relevant as anything I've come out of, as anything I've seen come out of a Christian Movie Studio over the last 25 years. We should all be paying attention to this, because it's going to show it. The light is going to reveal who these people are the complexity of this community, the needs of this community, but also the wisdom of this community, the fact that these people, too are made in the image of God, and their conscience is alive, and we might have things to learn from them. And so this this book, is largely about how growing up with the movies, for me, was a journey toward overcoming the fears I'd been conditioned to embrace and to live within and to take the risk. And it is a risk of becoming vulnerable and opening up and listening to my neighbors so I can love them. And the big discovery has been that I find God already at work in all these places I was told to avoid, and that I'm the one who has a lot to learn here that has made me rethink the Great Commission, you know, go, go and teach and baptize. I have a feeling that God wants us to go because he also wants us to discover that he's up to so much more than we ever imagined, and that in loving our neighbors, we are going to be ministered to as much as we might aspire to minister to others. So movies like the films of Hayao, Miyazaki, Christoph kislowski, Jafar Panahi and other filmmakers who don't end with that syllable, filmmakers I was told to fear and avoid, have had more to do with the strengthening of my faith, specifically my Christian faith, more so than the artist within the church, and I think it has something to do With that inclination to preach or to deliver a lesson which puts us, which assumes we are in a position of authority and expertise and knowing over other people, rather than inviting people into an experience together, where we might all discover something from one another. And that that takes me back to the the line that I can never forget in any conversation about the arts, that that is has become central to my faith and my understanding of of light and of cinema and of music. Madeleine Lingle, in her great book, walking on water, reflections on art and faith, says we do not draw people to Christ, or, of course, I would say, to love, to truth, to beauty, all of these things are Christ. To me, we do not draw people to Christ by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they will long with all their hearts to know the source of it that flipped my experience and my training in the church, which said, Don't go out there and make yourself vulnerable. You've already got all the answers. Go out there and insist that they agree with you and believe what you believe, and then they join your team. That was an us versus them dynamic. That was a separatist dynamic. It was not a love the world. As God so loved the world. The first scripture verse I ever memorized, right For God so loved the world. Love the world. Get out there and fear not. The refrain that is most commonly repeated in the scriptures is not love God, it is not love your neighbor. It is Fear not. And if I ask people in my community, in my neighborhood, right here, north of Seattle. What are the words that come to your mind first? If I say the word Evangelical, I guarantee you the word fear is going to be one of the most popular answers. So something has gone very, very wrong, and I am grateful to the movies and to the light for rescuing me from that, and I am still, you know, this is like an AA meeting. I'm not. I am. I am not a recovered evangelical. I am a recovering actually, I would like to argue that I am becoming an actual Evangelical, which would be the good news for the poor and the vulnerable and the needy, right? That would be me,

Joshua Johnson: 27:20

amen. I think that fear is it is something that we struggle with in the United States, particularly, more than, I think, a lot of places in the world. And I think then seeing something and seeing film from other places, so you're on. It was just an accident. Wrestling with the with fear wrestling, seeing the one that tortured you, and then then wrestling with so what do we what do we do are are we going to actually give some dignity and humanity to this person that actually tortured us, or are we going to dehumanize him like he did to us? What are we going to do with his family as we encounter their family. These are questions that we don't often ask here in America, that we need to be asking and we need to be confronted with. I think it was just an accident impacted the way I think that my faith and and how I follow Jesus, I think a couple of other films like last year that really impacted me. And my faith is like, wake up dead man, which was fantastic. The Phoenician scheme. And so because of the nation scheme, I want to talk a little bit about Wes Anderson. You write about Moonrise Kingdom in your book. As I was finishing chapter eight that chapter, I was crying with your depiction. It was just, it was a beautiful, beautiful chapter. And my

Jeffrey Overstreet: 28:46

wife, you can, I think you can. You can thank Wes Anderson for that more than you can thank me. But

Joshua Johnson: 28:51

I don't know the way that you write, the way that you write actually brings, brings that level of emotion out.

Unknown: 28:59

My

Joshua Johnson: 28:59

wife was like, What are you reading? You're reading a book about movies, and you're like, what's going on? But moon rise Kingdom feels like man. I think it's resonant for community, like, how do we take care of one another? What does it look like to grow up, to become adults, going through adolescence, but then actually seeing each other. I love that. The opening of, you know, a symphony, right at the very beginning of the film, talk a little bit about Wes Anderson and Moon rice kingdom, and what he's trying to say, what, what gift is he giving to us through his film?

Jeffrey Overstreet: 31:24

Okay? I mean, I really did feel that that chapter. I'm really glad you brought up that chapter, because that that has felt to me all along the way as the centerpiece of the book. It's, it's right at the heart of my adolescence. I didn't see it in adolescence. Obviously, it didn't open until I. Was already teaching film classes, but when I watch that movie, I am thinking about my adolescence. I am seeing it mirrored on the big screen in powerful ways. And it's another blustery day story. There's a storm coming. It's going to upset the community. There's the wonderful device of the community putting on a performance of Neues flute Noah's flood, the musical at the local church at the highest point in the town. And when the storm hits, everyone's going to run to the church to get to higher ground. What a wonderful metaphor, and it's full of all of this Noah's Ark stuff. So that's mirroring what's actually happening. They're all trying to escape the flood, right? This is a story about a troubled child who has been passed from one foster home to another, who has not yet experienced a loving, gracious, faithful, patient adult who is interested in him. He's been involved in a Boy Scout group called the khaki scouts. And the leadership there don't even know that this boy is an orphan, and he becomes he gets to a point where he is so fed up with insensitive, hypocritical authority figures that he runs away. And in my childhood, I would have judged him, you know, following the examples of those around me, I would have judged him and been like, what a bad kid. But he leaves because he's in search of what he longs for and needs. He leaves in search of a place where everything is in its right place, and where there is actual integrity. He does not reject the teachings he's received. He goes out to actually fulfill the teachings, rather than make a joke of them by being a hypocrite, and he takes his true love with him, right? She has grown up in a in a family that, from the outside, should you know, probably looks to people like, oh, wow, what a wonderful family. Look at all. Look at these parents who have stayed together. Look at these children. You take a closer look, and again, light and looking closely are central to this movie. Susie, the daughter in that family, is always using her binoculars, and that becomes sort of a symbol of the fact that she's actually taking a close look at things. She realizes that her mother is having an affair with a policeman. Her mother is a lawyer. Both of her parents are lawyers. The local policeman is the one who should know about law and order, who is right in front of her carrying out the deepest betrayal those who represent law and order. And so she, too is fed up, and she runs away. So Susie runs away with Sam schuusky, they go to the the edge of the water and create this idyllic sort of Garden of Eden, right? This place where they are going to start the world over and do things right? They're going to tell each other the truth. They're going to show each other mercy. They're going to love one another. Most Christian media I looked at, by the way, when this movie opened, was primarily objecting to the film because you see these 12 year olds kiss on the beach and maybe fool around a little bit. And I'm just thinking, Are you paying any attention to the rest of the story? If that is what troubles you most. Have you not questioned why this is happening? Have you not looked at the way their their parents are behaving there? I mean, while yes, I think it's inappropriate. You know, if I were their parent, I would be very concerned that this was going on without supervision and without proper growing up. But hopefully I would also understand that they're desperate. They don't have good role models, they don't have guidance. And so my concern is about the society in which these kids feel so desperate, feel so unseen and abandoned and misled. And the rest of the story becomes about how a child shall lead them right. The faith of the children calls out the hypocrisy and the Buried Secrets of the grown up world and becomes the the kindling for the light that will bring things back into order. And so at the end of that story, I'll try to avoid major spoilers, but one figure who the community should be able to look to for leadership and assurance and justice ends up taking that piglet step from the blustery day he realizes that enforcing the law is not going to solve This. He is going to have to make a personal sacrifice and make a gesture of grace that will kind of start a chain reaction to reconcile this community. He is going to, like Piglet, open his home and admit that he has as much to learn. Learn from this child, if the child has to learn from him. And there is a freeze frame image at the end of this film. I'll let you discover it. That is, for me, a picture of what needs to happen right here in the United States of America, right here in the in the church. And you, I mean you, choose your denomination. It's necessary everywhere. But we need grown ups who have one hand extended to those in need, in this case, the children, and another hand extended to the church, which is broken. By the way, in the picture, you can see the church is broken by the storm. But this one man, who has found his identity and his authority in being a figure of the law, is holding on to a broken church with one hand and children with the other. And you have a you have a cruciform pose. He is becoming Christ to them, and that's what the children respond to. Finally, that's what makes the children willing to come home. That's what makes the children willing to accept parental authority. Again, if grown ups can be figures of integrity and compassion and generosity and love and faithfulness, maybe there's a home there, and look around at what's happening in just in this in this nation right now, I have classrooms full of young people who have zero trust in the government and in the church, because they say, I hear you. I hear you teaching one thing. I hear you prioritizing love, but who are you protecting? Whose sins are you ignoring? Who are you elevating to positions of power, and what kind of decisions do they make in their personal lives and behind closed doors, their trust has been shattered. They look at Moonrise Kingdom and they are right there empathetically with Susie and Sam. So that's why it's the heart of the book. It really captures what was going on in in in movies that that started showing me the meaningfulness of Jesus, teaching an example above and beyond what I was seeing in the churches I grew up in, in the Christian schools I grew up in, in the world around me.

Joshua Johnson: 40:06

I think some people might take that and say, Okay, what's the lesson for us here? What do we do with film that we don't want to just boil it down to the moral lesson and how to how to live? But what do we do with that information? When we see a we finally see integrity. We finally see this adult being the adult for the children and bringing this community together. How do we act out of film and not just create a moral lesson out of it, but just how does it work on us in a way to make the world a better place?

Jeffrey Overstreet: 40:50

Well, unfortunately, this is the big missing piece of most people's engagement with with film and with art, and, frankly, with the Scriptures too. We are in a time and a place now where we have been conditioned to experience something and then go on to the next thing. And if we respond at all, we respond with a sort of thumbs up or thumbs down. We respond with a binary response. I liked it. I didn't like it, which is all about personal taste. It's not about discernment. What I love about teaching these film classes, or teaching the creative writing classes or the literature classes that I teach is that we have the opportunity to gather around a text and then I do not deliver the lesson. I invite everyone into a conversation about, what is the light revealing to you? What do you see is going on here? What are you curious about? What makes you uncomfortable, what compels you? And we end up talking about so much more than just the bare bones outline of the story that might lead to a lesson if we do focus on the bare bones story, I hear 10 different insights that people are arriving at from this and by listening to one another, I end up learning as much as they do from the conversation, but they also talk about, in the case of movies, cinematography, I love the colors in a Wes Anderson movie. I love how the costumes in a Wes Anderson movie aren't just quirky and fun, they actually represent particular values of each character. I love how the music works, and it's not just typical film score music, it's music that exists outside of the film, in this case with Moon rice kingdom, the music of Benjamin Britten and his wonderful Young Person's Guide to. The orchestra, one of the first pieces of classical music I ever paid attention to as a child that taught me all the different individual instruments of the orchestra and how when they work together, great things are possible, a central theme of the film, they start noticing how all of these things are working together in a way that just goes on speaking, and that's the missing piece. We need to create opportunities. And the church has a unique has the unique resources to be able to provide this places where people can come together and and process what they're experiencing at the movies or in pop music, or in the murder mystery series, they're they're reading through, or whatever, where they where they can have conversations about these things, learn from their neighbors, contribute to the conversation in a meaningful way, where they find out that their experience is valuable too. And what I find again and again and again is those conversations always move in the direction of wisdom. That doesn't necessarily mean we end up embracing everything we watched. It does mean that we come away discerning what is wise and what is truthful and what is beautiful there, and discerning those things that aren't quite right, that are gratuitous or that are wishful thinking, or that are self serving, and frankly, those those kinds of insights are just as likely to be made about quote, unquote, Christian art and entertainment as anything from the world. The more, the more these classrooms full of children who grew up evangelical focus on great art from around the world, the more I hear them saying, I'm starting to realize how the stuff I grew up on was just really poorly made, or the stuff I grew up on was more about tribal identity than it was about love and reconciliation. And those are really revealing conversations and exciting to me, because what I see there is not young people waking up to the wrongs of the church and disavowing it and running away, but learning to discern the difference between the teachings and example of Jesus the gospel And what has become more of a political debate and a political network and realizing that this is not working, but Jesus is working. Or for some of them, love and truth and beauty are working. You know Simone, the great Simone ve, the Christian mystic. Simone ve, said something that's probably the most controversial quotations I share. Quotation that I share with a class. I see a lot of concern and consternation when I read this, this quotation, but she says, I'm paraphrasing because I don't have the quote in front of me. Jesus Christ wants you to prefer the truth to him. Whoa. Wait a minute, what doesn't that assume he's not the truth. Jesus wants you to prefer the truth to him, because if you pursue the truth, you will eventually fall into his arms. That sounds like a contradiction, but I get it, because what happened to me was when I started pursuing and prioritizing truth and beauty at the movies, I kept finding myself arriving within Jesus, teaching within Jesus, example within the world, as Jesus revealed it to us. But what I left behind was not Jesus, but a very distorted version of Jesus, a stained glass version of Jesus that did not move me, but made me feel small and judged. And if you feel small and judged by Jesus, it's not Jesus that you're turning to. I'm so grateful for that insight from her, and I can see the class kind of coming around to understanding that by the time we've looked at so many of these different amazing works of beauty and truth and imagination from around the world, coming from filmmakers who would never identify themselves as religious. But as CS Lewis said, when you you know, when you when you write a story, when you make a work of art, you're not inventing something new. You're working with things God has already made. You're arranging things God has already made. And so those things come loaded with what God has given them. So a work of art is not just telling us what the artist thinks it there's they're so much more at work in a work of art that even the artist hasn't apprehended yet.

Joshua Johnson: 47:22

I love that Simone vague quote. I think that's crucial for both our understanding of of Jesus and moving towards who he really is for us and crucial for us to start to move towards one another, like we were just talking about having. In these conversations about about film and art and engaging each other across different ideas, and finding wisdom and and differences. And I think if we pursue truth, we're going to be able to do it. Instead of saying, I have the truth, and you have to bend to bend to me, we're actually pursuing wisdom and truth. And where do we find each other? We could actually start to have these conversations. And I think we could move out of our tribalistic camps, and I hope we can start to see each other again. I really do hope we can see each other. What recently as you have been to the Cathedral of cinema. Has, has there been a movie that has really resonated with you spiritually? Has, have you had a spiritual experience with any movie recently that could share,

Jeffrey Overstreet: 48:36

oh, boy. How do I narrow it down? I mean, I've just published@jeffreyoverstreet.com my annual list, and I can never keep it to 10. It's more like 35 or 40 films that spoke meaningfully to me over the course of the year. But if I had to narrow down, I mean, you mentioned the Phoenician scheme, another Wes Anderson film that even Wes Anderson films were sort of or Wes Anderson fans were sort of skeptical of. I actually thought it was his funniest movie, but it's also a story we need right now about an oligarch who is full of himself, who is causing untold harm to lives around the world with his decisions and his cultural manipulation, who by engaging with his very skeptical and cynical daughter, who also happens to be a nun, starts wrestling with questions of conscience, and like any good blustery day story, he arrives at a point where he has to face the fact that what could save the world here would involve some kind of sacrifice on his part. I thought it was a wonderful comedy that may feel like wishful thinking because it's so hard for us to imagine oligarchs suddenly having a change of heart. But Wouldn't you love to live in a world where that's possible? And don't the scriptures give us examples of such things, but the movies that I'm most excited for people to see from from the year all? I mean, I would also have to mention, wake up dead man. You know, it's a genre film, a murder mystery in the knives out series, but one of the most powerful pictures of the church as American culture knows it, that is to say, fearful, vindictive, exclusionary, judgmental, and the church as it could be, as envisioned by this father, Judd, played by Josh O'Connor, who's whose teaching is about having opened open hands, not closed fists, when we look, when we look at the world. And I was so I just sat there Thunderstruck in the theater, just in awe of what was happening in front of a general audience and how engaged the general audience was, because he got them by having them by by having them join together to reject what they don't like in culture, and then slowly invited them toward a vision of What could be and and reveal the tedcent That's that's aligned with the teachings of Jesus. And what a powerful film from someone who identifies as or who no longer identifies as a church going Christian. I just thought that was phenomenal. But the the one I want to hold up most right now is actually a film that I think most of your listeners probably haven't heard of. It's a film from Zambia called on becoming a guinea fowl. Now, a guinea fowl is a very, very easily frightened kind of bird, kind of like, you know, like a quail that runs around and hoots and hoots to warn other animals of danger. And this film out of Zambia from a great director who seems to be just getting started, named ragana nioni, she tells a story based in her experience in a village in Zambia where the patriarchal culture has enabled and in fact advanced the sexual abuse of women in the village, and she comes home after having kind of run away from that culture and joined a larger society, she comes home to this place, and as you can see, the PTSD waking up in her as she remembers the traditions, the rituals and the ignorance At the heart of the village, she finds a dead man in the road, discovers that it's her uncle, and right away we see real mixed emotions on her face. This is a story about her coming home to discover that a very active, notorious abuser in her community has died, and the community. He is going to do its ritual of honoring that man and celebrating how great he was and even. And what I thought was so interesting was how many of the women in the village don't want to talk about the harm he did and the crimes that never, never came into the light. And Shula, our main character, wants to bring the crimes into the light while the whole community is working against her to say, no, no, don't disrupt the community with the truth. Let us bury this man in honor. And it's excruciating to watch the men in power who, by the way, are empowered by the language of the Evangelical Church, the Western Evangelical Church, to perpetuate power, to hold on to power, to bury scandal, and to continue this culture of sexual abuse. And what I realized while I was sitting there, was, this is a movie we need in America right now, because it takes us out of the arguments we've been having, and shows us up close what something like the Epstein files reveal. This is a movie about a culture of toxic patriarchal violence against women and how and it's going to it's going to pierce your conscience with how badly that community needs the truth and the fact that truth tellers are going to have to push back against the church to show love to these victims. It's a Believe it or not, it's a funny movie, it's a strange movie. You probably need some coffee before you watch it, because it's slow moving, but it's the movie that has haunted me most from last year, and one of those great examples of a movie that's filled with, I believe the Holy Spirit, even as God is calling out hypocrisy in the church, but it makes it a global problem, not just a problem with this particular administration, For example. So I'm so grateful for on becoming a guinea fowl. It's a it's a beautiful film. I hope people will watch it with groups and plan to have time afterwards to talk about it, because that's where the real work is done.

Joshua Johnson: 54:55

Yeah, we should do that more often, just as we interact and engage in film and art itself is actually, have conversations about it, engage it, and don't just move on to the next thing right away. Really on becoming guinea fowl. People seek that out. Fantastic film. Your book, Lost and Found in the Cathedral of cinema, will be out in May. Everywhere books are sold. It's a fantastic book. I love it. This really is one of my favorite books I've read in a while. I really, really, really love this book.

Jeffrey Overstreet: 55:29

Thank you so much.

Joshua Johnson: 55:30

What do you hope that people get from your book?

Jeffrey Overstreet: 55:35

I mean, it's, I realize it's a, it's a, it's an opportunity of great privilege to get to tell these, these stories about growing up with movies and to get to thank so many people who have personally been shining lights. But my my hope is not so much what they get from it as the conversations I hope we have afterwards. I hope they will read it and write to me as they're reading it. I want to know what is this making you think about because I have a feeling I'm going to learn a whole lot more about some of my own favorite movies, but also about the world around me. And I have I'm confident that if we have those conversations, I'm going to discover a whole bunch of new best friends. This is what I tell my film classes on day one. I'm like, I hope that tonight I am meeting 20 of my new best friends, and more often than not, I come away with several more that I'm going to be corresponding with for the rest of my life because of the experiences we've had together. So as I tell my life story with movies, I'm hoping I hear from readers about theirs, so that the conversation becomes bigger and richer, and we start seeing more, not just in movie theaters, but everywhere we go.

Joshua Johnson: 56:48

Well, couple really quick questions here I like to ask at the end. One, if you go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would

Unknown: 56:55

you give

Jeffrey Overstreet: 56:55

trust your conscience and know that, contrary to what you've been taught, the path of Christian faith is not going to lead you to happiness upon happiness upon happiness. Happiness is based on circumstances. It's based on how you feel. Happiness is fleeting and temporal. Joy, on the other hand, is much bigger and much deeper than that, and if you follow your conscience, you are going to suffer just like Jesus promised you would. You know, Jesus does not say, come join me at the party so much as he says, take up your cross. But in doing so, in learning to overcome your fears, in learning to believe that on that through these sufferings, we become more deeply acquainted with God. We also become. Am much more capable of joy, and joy is based on things that last joy is based on a vision that does not shove away, deny, ignore suffering, but that makes meaning of it, that takes suffering like a blustery day and redeems it into something more beautiful than what we had before that requires a lot of dark nights of the soul where you don't have answers, but it makes you capable of getting through those dark nights, because you start seeing more and more evidence that on the other side of this there's still beauty. Goodness and mercy will follow me, not goodness and mercy is waiting for me. Goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. I wish I could sit my 21 year old self down and say, You are in for more hardship than you can possibly imagine, because the Christian communities around you are not going to like what you're saying. They're going to be offended by it. They're going to feel threatened by it, but those who live in fear may start waking up to not what I'm teaching, but what I am discovering. And then you'll have more companions on the journey toward light and freedom, rather than clinging to some kind of tribal identity in a separate separatist community in the dark. So I would just say, trust that. Stick with that. That's the direction to move.

Joshua Johnson: 59:11

I usually like to ask anything you've been reading or watching lately you could recommend talk about unbecoming guinea fowl and others throughout this conversation, but anything else that you'd like to recommend

Jeffrey Overstreet: 59:22

these days, I I learned more from from poetry than from story, and I think that has a lot to do with movies. I find the films that affect me most are the ones where a simple picture of a tree in the light, or of a character's face or of a feather that's that's resting on a pillow, and you can tell that someone is sleeping peacefully, by the way, the feather is pulsing. Poetry does this for me. It takes my attention off of the big picture, which I really don't think I'm designed to pay attention to. Doom scrolling is is a terrible thing. It makes you aware of so much that is going on in the world that you don't have the capacity to process, and that cultivates panic and fear poetry. Poetry focuses our attention on such specific, small things, but by attending to the esthetics with which those things are presented, we are drawn into the beauty of them, and when that happens, it enables us to see that what's going on in this small thing is also true of the big thing. So while I'm pointing you to poetry, I would encourage you especially to read the poetry of Scott Cairns, who's whose vision, whose theology, whose faith and sense of humor have had, have been such a guiding light to me. So I encourage you to read the poetry of Scott Cairns, the poetry of Tanya Runyon. She has a, I think it's a subset called poet Jesus, where she writes poems of spiritual reflection on what's going on right now. And she is hilarious, but she also has a way in her comedy of revealing things that are stark and true in ways that change me. I am very grateful to be married to Anne M doe Overstreet, who is also a poet, and who has a book called delicate machinery suspended that I teach in my creative writing classes, because I think the poems are so good, not just because I'm married to her. And the students agree. In cinema, I always want to point people to the poetry of Christoph keshelowski, especially the film Three Colors Blue, the poetry of Terrence Malick, especially his films the New World and the tree of life. And I hear that we have a major film coming from him about about the life of Christ. And I'm almost scared of that, because his movies are so powerful to me. Yeah, poetry,

Joshua Johnson: 1:01:52

wonderful. Hopefully we get that Terrence Malick film. It's been in the works for years and years. So hopefully we actually get that and it'll actually come out. That would be great to be able to see it. Jeffrey, this has been a fantastic conversation. Lost and Found at the Cathedral of cinema is out in May. Everywhere books are sold, anywhere you'd like to point people to how could they connect with you and your work and what you're doing.

Jeffrey Overstreet: 1:02:15

After many years at looking closer.org I have closed down that website and moved everything onto a platform, on the ghost platform, which is, which is just Jeffrey overstreet.com it's kind of a mess, because I just converted everything to that, that other website. And so a lot of the links are broken and things like that. But more than 25 years of my writing on film and music and faith can be found there. And I'm. Repairing it all as fast as I can. Feel free to email me at j over street or drover Street at Gmail if you have questions or comments on this. And I'm teaching classes on film and Creative Writing at Seattle Pacific University, and I'd love to see you in the class there sometime if you're interested in joining that conversation.

Joshua Johnson: 1:03:00

Awesome. Well, Jeffrey, thank you for this conversation. It was fantastic. Loved walking through film and the spiritual life with you. It was a great conversation. So thank you so much.

Jeffrey Overstreet: 1:03:10

Thank you very much. It's been a joy to be here.

Unknown: 1:03:23

You