Journal of Religion & Film

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October 2022

Introduction

This month, we publish four articles that were originally part of a panel on “Teaching Asian Religions Through Film” at the Association for Asian Studies conference in Honolulu, Hawaii, March 24-27, 2022. The panel offered concrete examples on how to adopt cinema and TV to discuss Asian religions, culture, and modernity in the classroom and contributed to the developing analysis concerning the use of visual media in Asian studies pedagogy. The set includes articles by Gloria I-Ling Chien, Jeff Richey, and Candace Mixon, and a response essay by Robin Rinehart. We are happy to support the scholarship of teaching related to religion and film, and we believe you will find each of these essays a valuable contribution to that scholarship.

We also publish this month Shaheed Mohammed's article on "Religious Hegemony and 'Muslim' Horror Movies," as well as book reviews, film reviews, and our coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival.

Finally, I include as my Editorial the published form of the opening keynote address which I delivered at the 2022 International Conference on Religion and Film at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam: "Life in the Multiverse: Bringing Chaos Out of Order?" This conference was a wonderful opportunity to renew in-person conversations about religion and film after a three year hiatus, and I am grateful to all the contributors as well as the organizers whose efforts made it such a success.

I hope you enjoy all these offerings this month, and that you will return often to our journal.

John Lyden