Fernando Gros

Why Joss Whedon Is a Better Theologian than Most Bloggers and Preachers

A while back Ryan Torma made available his paper on Whedon’s Serenity and Firefly, delivered at the International Conference on Media, Religion, Culture (you can download the PDF here).

My only criticism of Ryan’s paper is that he tries to justify reading film/television works like these on missional and apologetic terms; that is, they give us ground to talk to those outside the church. Perhaps we can think more broadly than just that, both in terms of how film provides believers with resources for critical theological reflection and how films and the cine-socioeconomic context within they exist allow us to exegete culture. Studying film is not just a missio-apologetic enterprise, it is also a critically theological one as well.

But those issues aside, Ryan has a lot of worthwhile things to say about both the film and TV series and has inspired me to write more on this area.

I’ve long felt Whedon has a better grasp of the human condition and the contradictions in at work in the human heart than many “official” commentators on the faith. Most importantly, the popularity of his work reveals as a bald lie the populist notion that contemporary society does not want to think about or reflect upon ideas of sin and personal responsibility.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 at 10:23 am and is filed under Film Reviews, Film Theory, Missional Church. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.