Jeffrey Overstreet presents 'Lost & Found in the Cathedral of Cinema'

A film critic and professor explores how great films changed his relationship to faith.

Third Place Books welcomes author, film critic, and Seattle Pacific University professor Jeffrey Overstreet to our Lake Forest Park store for a conversation about his new book, Lost & Found in the Cathedral of Cinema: A Spiritual Journey. Through personal stories, Overstreet explores how great movies helped him escape from fear-based religion into richer experiences of imagination, beauty, community, and faith.

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About Lost & Found in the Cathedral of Cinema. . .

What if watching movies could be a spiritual discipline? For one film critic, great films became guiding lights -- an escape from fear-based religion into richer experiences of imagination, beauty, community, and faith.

Growing up in a bubble of churches and Christian schools, Jeffrey Overstreet was taught by example to condemn "worldly" art and culture as predatory and poisonous. Yet, the flicker of light from cinema screens proved a temptation too powerful to resist. And what he found there was quite the opposite of what he'd been told: He found God at play in ten thousand theaters. Now, through deeply personal and eye-opening stories, Overstreet invites you to retrace a revelatory journey: from Pinocchio to My Neighbor Totoro, from Disney's Hundred-Acre Wood to The Tree of Life, from The Black Stallion to Blade Runner, from Dead Poets Society and Do the Right Thing to Moonrise Kingdom and Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.

Spoiler: Movies do not burn down Overstreet's faith. Rather, they free him to answer the Scriptures' instruction -- not only to love the world, but to learn from it. Great cinema invites us to hear a holy voice in the beauty of the natural world, and to break away from destructive distortions of Jesus's teaching. Guided by the lights of screens and Scripture, the author of Through a Screen Darkly and the fantasy novel Auralia's Colors testifies of a God who moves in mysterious ways, calling us into a life of courageous creativity.

Jeffrey Overstreet is the author of the film-focused memoir Through a Screen Darkly and the four-volume fantasy series The Auralia Thread, which begins with Auralia's Colors. He is an associate professor at Seattle Pacific University, teaching creative writing, academic writing, and film studies. (Students there voted him Undergraduate Professor of the Year in 2024.) His award-winning essays and reviews have appeared in Image, Paste, Bright Wall Dark Room, and Christianity Today, where he served as Senior Film Critic. You can explore more than 25 years of his writing on the arts at JeffreyOverstreet.com. Jeffrey and his wife Anne, who is working on a follow-up to her poetry collection Delicate Machinery Suspended, live in Shoreline, Washington, where they are closely monitored by their cat FBI Special Agent Alonzo Mosely.

About Third Place Books

Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events