Luminous: The Spiritual Life on Film

This book is a comprehensive survey of religion and spirituality on film. It explores different aspects of the spiritual life as projected in more than 400 movies. Film settings embrace all of the major faiths, smaller religious groupings, the New Age, and even contexts that are in the first instance secular, atheist or anti-religious. A dozen themes have been identified in which to group them. Two types of film were excluded: escapist fantasy and the religious costume drama. The final selection are films of highly serious intent (which include however very human dramas and humorous moments). The 12 chapters of the book illuminate the lived spiritual life from many angles, mostly within the drama of people’s lives rather than in matters of creed or religious specifics. When the unique art-form of film, with its aesthetics of light and movement, coincide with scenes of high spiritual drama we have a cinema that can be called “luminous.” The search is on for such films.