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Crystal L. Downing

Blog

Judging King Kong by its Cover: The Aping of Beauty

When visitors enter the museum at Wheaton College’s Marion E. Wade Center, which archives work about and by C.S. Lewis and six of his British influencers, they are treated to an eye-popping display of 53 book covers from famous works: The Two Towers from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Lewis’s Perelandra, Sayers’s first Lord Peter…
Crystal L. Downing
November 17, 2021
Blog

Theo-Drama and Mise-en-Scéne

In my current book project, The Wages of Cinema: Looking through the Lens of Dorothy L. Sayers, I argue that full appreciation for the relationship between Christianity and film necessitates knowledge about the history of theater: a word that comes from the Greek “to see.” Seeing the medium, whether on stage or screen, echoes one…
Crystal L. Downing
June 28, 2021
Blog

The Fortress of Christian Higher Education

Decades ago, when I informed an acquaintance that I had accepted a tenure-track position at a Christian college, he shifted his eyes awkwardly before smiling out, “Sounds like a nice place to send my daughters.” I repeat the appalling comment—appalling on many different levels—in order to contrast it with a different kind of parental approach…
Crystal L. Downing
June 10, 2021
Blog

Academic Freedom: From Ram-skit to Bull-dung

My first lesson in academic freedom came not long after completing my Ph.D., at which time I was invited to teach a course in Medieval Drama at a Research-I university. In addition to allegorical morality plays, wherein Everyman must negotiate attacks from the World, the Flesh, and the Devil, medieval playwrights dramatized Bible stories and…
Crystal L. Downing
May 14, 2021
Blog

The Betrayal of Certitude

A Christian liberal arts education should undermine certitude: something I learned from Dorothy L. Sayers, whose twelve radio plays about Jesus were so cherished by C. S. Lewis that he read them every year until he died. In my new book, Subversive: Christ, Culture, and the Shocking Dorothy L. Sayers (Broadleaf 2020), I recount how…
Crystal L. Downing
April 12, 2021
Blog

Amputating the Liberal Arts

As theaters, museums, and concert halls struggle during these covidious times, I worry about the respiratory system of the arts. Only a year and half after I took my current job co-directing the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College, which archives the work of seven culture-animating British Christians, the center’s museum and research-room were…
Crystal L. Downing
March 22, 2021
Blog

Cinema: In the Beginning

Related to kinesis, Greek for movement, the word cinema resonates with the beginnings described at the start of the Bible. In the first chapter of Genesis we read, “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” According to Hebrew scholar Brian Smith, the verb translated as “moved” occurs only three times…
Crystal L. Downing
February 22, 2021
Blog

January 6 and the Fixation of Belief

I imagine that most of us are looking through the binocular lenses of scholarly specialization and Christian faith as we seek to understand the January 6 attack on the Capitol: a day of infamy that will be a defining moment in our students’ lives, much as 9-11, the Challenger explosion, and the assassination of Martin…
Crystal L. Downing
January 26, 2021
Blog

Shocking Our Socks off the Mantle

Annoyed by plump plastic Santas perched on suburban lawns, I was suddenly struck by the relevance of my scholarship to cultural conceptions of Christmas. In my November CSR blog, I discussed the need for Christians to avoid an “economy of exchange” in their vocabularies about salvation, and this time of year we can’t help but…
Crystal L. Downing
December 14, 2020
Blog

Aiming for Abnormality

During the 1992 election, James Carville coined an infamous aphorism: “It’s the economy, stupid!” I thought of it as I read Tim Meuhlhoff’s CSR blog for October 19, which beautifully argues against an economic model of discourse, by which one pays or exchanges “evil for evil or insult for insult.” Communication for Christians, especially in…
Crystal L. Downing
November 18, 2020
Blog

Naughty Gnosticism and Film Scholarship

I ended my last post suggesting “the relevance of cinema to Christian orthodoxy.” What exactly does this mean? On one level the answer is easy: award-winning films have portrayed dedication to Christ with respect, such as The Mission (1986, Roland Joffé) and the recently streamed A Hidden Life (2019, Terrence Malick), about a martyred Austrian,…
Crystal L. Downing
October 26, 2020
Blog

Toward a Christian Film Aesthetic

As co-director of the Marion E. Wade Center, the world’s most comprehensive archive of books and autographs by and about C. S. Lewis and six of his most important influencers, I have delighted in reading unpublished correspondence and manuscripts by Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957), whose radio plays about Jesus nurtured Lewis’s spiritual life. Among the many…
Crystal L. Downing
September 14, 2020
Reviews

Reforming Hollywood: How American Protestants Fought for Freedom at the Movies

Reviewed by Crystal Downing, English and Film Studies, Messiah College Several years ago I began a book review with these words: “Movies can elicit profound, sometimes dismaying, reflections about the reciprocal influence between religion and society, faith and culture, belief and behavior. Rarely, however, do filmgoers consider the influence of religion on the production of…
Crystal L. Downing
July 15, 2013
Review Essays

Strange Bedfellows: Faith and Film—A Review Essay

My education in film came in my 20s when a friend named Paul recognized our town’s need for an “art-house” theater: a place where foreign and independent film might provide an intelligent alternative to Hollywood fare. (That was the era before VCRs and DVDs made foreign films readily accessible.) Renting the cafeteria of a Montessori…
Crystal L. Downing
July 15, 2011