Why do so many Christian writers become film critics?
In the past decade, an astounding number of books and websites have attempted to divine the Christian meaning and value of film. I am going to call this writing Christian film criticism, which is the most used term on the web and in other books. Christian is always a tricky term to use, but I think it’s the best1. “Critic” is also a complicated word to use, and Christian writers span from Roger and Ebert to academic style criticism— not to mention the usage of criticism meaning disapproval, which there is also plenty of. There’s a blog article, What on Earth is Christian Film Criticism, that does well at considering both of these terms. I really didn’t know that there were so many books about Christian film criticism until I started reading them. I’ve read parts of most of the books available, but there is a fair amount of overlap in these books and some of these books are poorer in quality and relevance2 Because of this overlap, and to be more concise, I’ll limit my survey to a few of
