FILM AND RELIGION. While the academic study of "film and religion" as a subfield within religious studies has only come of age since the late 1980s, the connection between film and religion is as old as film itself. As film theorist André Bazin once put it, "The cinema has always been interested in God" (Bazin, 1997, p. 61). Indeed, if one accepts the now-standard origin of cinema to begin with the Lumière brothers' first public screening for a paying audience in December 1895, then the first decade of cinema saw at least a half dozen filmed versions of the life and passion of Jesus Christ, including those made by the inventors of film themselves, Thomas Edison and Louis Lumière. The figure of Jesus Christ has continued to be a popular topic for film and a touchstone for cinematic controversy throughout the twentieth century, with such...