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Phillip Maciak, The Disappearing Christ: Secularism in the Silent Era (Columbia University Press, 2019), and Terry Lindvall, Souls for Sale: Rupert Hughes and the Novel Hollywood Religion (Cascade Books, 2021) Maciak, Phillip, The Disappearing Christ: Secularism in the Silent Era (Columbia University Press, 2019) Lindvall, Terry, Souls for Sale: Rupert Hughes and the Novel Hollywood Religion (Cascade Books, 2021) Early cinema has its hooks in us. The former is a contemporary horror/sci-fi/westem about something hiding in the clouds above a horse ranch but contains many references to silent cinema.1 The latter is a comic/horror/epic retelling of myths of 1920s Hollywood in the form of a roman a def2 Both films are about spectacle, and how it can eat us alive-slightly more literally in Nope's case, and both directly probe the origin of the relationship between religion and film. Into this mix comes at last Rupert Hughes himself, whose Yale education moved him away from Christian belief, and whose essay \"The Art of Moving Picture Composition\" (1923) defending the artistic worthiness of film puts him into the \"modernist\" camp. A year later, Hughes wrote and directed a feature adaptation of Souls for Sale, starring silent screen ingenue Eleanor Boardman, which Lindvall analyzes in Chapter Seven.3 Rupert Hughes, for whom \"what was destroying the fabric of the American soul was religion, not the movies\" (97) makes for a fascinating subject.

This is a review of two books: Phillip Maciak, The Disappearing Christ: Secularism in the Silent Era (Columbia University Press, 2019), and Terry Lindvall, Souls for Sale: Rupert Hughes and the Novel Hollywood Religion (Cascade Books, 2021)

Les pratiques de culture corporelle taoïste sont de plus en plus répandues en Occident depuis quelques décennies. À quel point ces pratiques et les organisations qui les diffusent peuvent être dénommées « taoïstes », est une question controversée parmi les spécialistes et les pratiquants. Dans cet article, nous soutenons que les pratiques culturelles sont inévitablement transformées lorsqu’elles sont introduites dans un nouveau contexte social. Nous présentons le cas ethnographique des « China Dream Trips » organisés par « Healing Tao USA », l’une des principales organisations populaires taoïstes aux États-Unis, pour analyser l’appropriation de l’identité taoïste par une longue tradition euro-américaine d’individualisme spirituel, transformant le noyau ontologique et l’orientation pratique de la tradition taoïste. Comme les autres promoteurs de la « spiritualité alternative » américaine, « Healing Tao USA » propose une nouvelle synthèse entre les techniques spirituelles de l’Orient et la psychologie, la liberté et l’épanouissement sexuel de l’Occident — une nouvelle culture holiste qui promet de transformer le monde en transcendant le dogmatisme de la religion instituée et le mécanisme matérialiste de la culture laïque. Mais d’un point de vue sociologique, il apparaît que le taoïsme populaire américain tend plutôt à reproduire et à renforcer la structure culturelle qu’il prétend surmonter.

The late Melanie Wright succinctly summed up a key problem facing the subfield of religion and film with the following syllogism: films are about 'life' and its meaning, religion is about 'life' and its meaning, all films are 'religious.' Wright argued that inasmuch as this syllogism is the unacknowledged operating principle in the religious analysis of film, then said analysis is \"effectively meaningless.\" Religion and film continues to be a growing subfield that is showing signs of diversifying in terms of methodologies as well as subject matter. Most religious studies analyses of particular films up until now have come from a Christian theological, archetypal-mythological, and/or normative-ethical perspective, though there is also an important growing body of work on non-Western religions and film. Here, Siegler discusses the relation of film and religion and examines the themes in David Cronenberg's films.

This article, based on personal interviews and written surveys of dozens of Americans who self-identify as Daoist, asks how American Daoism provides meaning and shapes the identity of its American adherents. Using Wade Clark Roof's theories about Baby Boomers's spiritual quest as a search for meaning, this article shows how American Daoism can be both a component of and a resolution to this spiritual quest. It analyzes the strategies American Daoists use to assemble a stable identity, including constructing lineages based on personal transmission and positing the existence of an \"inauthentic\" Daoism, often identified as \"folk\" or \"religious,\" which serves to authenticate their perceived spiritual Daoism.

Whereas The Brood is a classic of body horror (a genre of which Cronenberg has been rightfully credited as the founder), The Shrouds, if all you knew about it was that it is a noted horror auteur's deeply personal film about illness, loss, and the death of a loved one, you might think it would be a ghost story, or a tale of the undead. If one must pin down the genre, one might call The Shrouds \"an international technothriller art film.\" In some ways, The Shrouds embodies a very old debate between tradition and modernity or religion and atheism, enacted at multiple levels, not least in a seemingly throwaway bit of dialogue about the \"burial versus cremation\" debate: burial being necessary in the Jewish tradition, while cremation being seen as more ecological and modern. Cronenberg, wisely, does not presume to settle this debate, but simply records how it plays out on an emotional level-through a powerful depiction of grief, yes, but also of confusion and anger (at a medical establishment that robs us of our power, among other indignities).