Nostalgia Interviews With Chris Deacy

My guest this week is Terry Lindvall, the C.S. Lewis Chair of Communication and Christian Thought at Virginia Wesleyan University. Terry talks about his seminary background, looking at religion and popular culture, and we find out about Terry’s academic history and his work in history, theology and communications. We discuss how both of us have been influenced by H. Richard Niebuhr’s seminal work on Christ and Culture, as well as the role of censorship and why, as Terry attests, the church should be using movies as they employ parables. He talks about the importance of showing film clips to his students, e.g. Pixar films, in terms of disclosing the divine. We also talk about Roger Ebert’s learned film reviewing. Terry discusses how he looks at the role of prayer in film in relation, for example, to the films of Robert Benton, and the spiritual journeys that other filmmakers are on. Terry also reflects on how agents tend to stop people like us from getting through to filmmakers. Terry was born in Basel, Swi