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    When Jesus Came to Hollywood
    When Jesus Came to Hollywood
    When Jesus Came to Hollywood
    Ebook48 pages46 minutes

    When Jesus Came to Hollywood

    By Leslie Kendall

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    About this ebook

    'When Jesus Came to Hollywood' investigates how movies have helped shape our perceptions of Jesus. Take a close look at some of the dozens of interpretations of Jesus, from the sugary Victorian to the angst-ridden postmodern. The New Testament has provided rich fare for moviemakers for well over a century now. While France led the way in early religious movies, Hollywood soon took over and has remained the single most important producer of Jesus-movies ever since.

    Author Leslie Kendall highlights the strange relationship between church and Jesus-movies: As religion has declined in significance in Western society, particularly since the mid-20th century, so the number of Jesus-movies has grown and grown. On average, a movie ‘starring’ Jesus has been made every two years for a century-plus, but the majority of them have been produced since 1950. Whatever deep collective psychology is at work here, it is clearly true that Hollywood is not about to give up on Christianity – it’s too rewarding at the box office for that! Whatever your take on Jesus is, you’ll get some surprises in When Jesus Came to Hollywood.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLeslie Kendall
    Release dateJun 19, 2012
    ISBN9781476236520
    When Jesus Came to Hollywood
    Author

    Leslie Kendall

    With a career in journalism behind me, I'm now doing what I always wanted to do – writing about subjects that interest me rather than subjects that interest editors. These include religion, philosophy, feminism, language and history. I'm married to Erica and we have two grown-up daughters. We live in the town of Shrewsbury, in the beautiful English county of Shropshire. I rebelled against mainstream Christianity years ago and have since studied alternative understandings of Christianity and the relation between it and other world faiths. As part of this I'm studying for a degree with Oxford Brookes University, majoring in religion and philosophy. I start work soon on my dissertation, which will explore the relationship between God and the Self, specifically the way we have moved over recent centuries from belief in a God ‘out there somewhere’ to an inner, existential understanding of deity. Future ebooks will pick up on some of the themes to be developed, including the question of whether we have become so self-referential in spiritual matters that we have discarded God. Other areas I hope to write about include the role of women in shaping postmodern society’s understanding of itself.

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      Book preview

      When Jesus Came to Hollywood - Leslie Kendall

      When Jesus Came to Hollywood

      by Leslie Kendall

      (copyright 2012 Leslie Kendall)

      Smashwords Edition

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Chapter 1 Introduction

      Chapter 2 Choose Your Jesus

      Chapter 3 The Silent Days

      Chapter 4 Mid-century revival

      Chapter 5 Existential Jesus

      Chapter 6 Whose Jesus?

      Chapter 7 Anachronism

      Chapter 8 Case studies

      Chapter 9 What can we really say about Jesus?

      Chapter 10 Christian themes

      Chapter 11 Deficient Jesus

      Chapter 12 Jesus, women and sex

      Chapter 13 Jesus and divinity

      Chapter 14 What would Superman do?

      Chapter 15 Violence

      Chapter 16 Conclusion

      Chapter 17 Sources and Filmography

      Chapter 1 Introduction

      Sometimes you have to wonder if God looks at us and thinks My word, they’ve changed! Just a few centuries ago we knew our place, and we went to church and did what the clergy told us was required to keep God happy. Now we don’t much care whether God is happy or not and in much of the Christian world regular church attendance is down to a small fraction of the adult population. There are numerous reasons for this, and one of them is the movies. And, of course, television which feeds us an endless diet of movies. Whether the churches like it or not, modern men and women are not buying into traditional expressions of faith any more. They think for themselves, but what images do they see when they think about God and Jesus? The idea behind this ebook is to look in a non-academic way at what Hollywood has done with Jesus. I think I can safely promise a few surprises!

      Chapter 2 Choose your Jesus

      Our perception of the Almighty and our relationship with him/her/it has been changed forever in the 130 or so years that films have been around. Vast numbers of other things went on as well in that time, of course, which have also contributed enormously to our unprecedented views about God - not least being two World Wars, numerous regional conflicts, the Great Depression, and (on a happier note) a much better educated society and more leisure time than ever before in history. But when it came to filtering information and perceptions – most importantly, perceptions – through to the general public, it was the movies that were at the centre of shaping our understanding and our emotions.

      Now when it comes to romance or adventure or comedy, that’s generally fine, but when it comes to God, the stakes are a bit higher. From the start Hollywood saw everything as fair game for a movie subject, including the Almighty. So just how has God fared as a movie star? Of course, when we talk about God we are talking about something we can’t see. But we can see representations of the central character in Christianity, Jesus. After all, the main claim of the world’s biggest religion is that 2,000 or so years ago God was incarnated as the man Jesus and lived and taught in Israel. For Hollywood – and to a lesser extent European film-makers – that was perfect. And since Cecil B Demille’s silent and unequalled epic The King of Kings in 1928 Jesus has been a regular visitor to the silver screen.

      Jesus-movies are a sub-genre of religious cinema, which is not restricted to Christianity or to a particular culture. Most societies explore aspects of their relationship with God, however

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