The Silents of God: Selected Issues and Documents in Silent American Film and Religion, 1908-1925 [Hardcover]

Covering the historical period from 1908 to 1925, this study showcases pamphlets, magazine articles (from both religious and film periodicals), sermons, and other discourse that chronicle an early vision of church/photoplay cooperation and its subsequent dissolution with the advent of growing suspicion, Hollywood scandals, Sabbatical reform movements, and alternative communication technologies. This collection of documents challenges the enduring fiction that the Church was hostile to the moving picture at its inception; rather, the Church sought to appropriate its potential for evangelism, education, and social reform. Divided into four chronological sections, the study traces the process of religious response to film as a prophetic vision, a series of great debates, the articulation of film as a handmaiden to church work, and the great divorce of church and cinema, culminating in a religious posture and emphasis on rigid censorship rather than creative dialogue.Terry Lindvallis the Distinguished Chair of Visual Communication in the College of Communication and the Arts at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia.Of course the anthology can only include a fraction of the literature available-but never mind; the absolutely stupendous bibliography...is almost 50 pages. Choice Reviews

Part 1 A Prophetic Vision, 1908-1913
Chapter 2 Moving Pictures and the Pulpit
Chapter 3 Minister Proposes Sunday Pictures and Missionaries and Moving Pictures
Chapter 4 Editorial: The Clergy and the Moving Picture
Chapter 5 Amusement as a Factor in Man's Spiritual Uplift
Chapter 6 Vaudettes
Chapter 7 The Clergy and the Picture
Chapter 8 The Case for Motion Pictures: Part I
Chapter 9 The Case for Motion Pictures: Part II
Chapter 10 Motography as an Arm of the Church
Chapter 11 The Religious Possibilities of the Motion Picture
Chapter 12 The Picture in the Pulpit (October 26, 1912)
Chapter 13 The Picture in the Pulpit (Novembel3.