Nostalgia Interviews With Chris Deacy

It was a delight this week via Zoom to meet John Lyden for my latest Nostalgia Interview. John is Blizek Professor of Religion and Film at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and has been editor of the Journal of Religion and Film since 2011, a field of study which John has been keen to get people to take seriously. We talk about the importance of interdisciplinarity and how his religion and film work was borne out of his teaching and his hobbies. John was born in Seattle and grew up in Connecticut in the 1960s. We learn that he was raised a Lutheran, wanted to be a scientist at the time of the Apollo programme, and ended up doing a Theology degree due to his own religious questions. He has always loved movies, and his earliest memories include seeing The Music Man. John reflects on how he appreciates pop music from the past more now than he did at the time and we learn that he comes from a musical family. His father was an accountant and had a naval career during the Second World War, and was at Norman