Where’s the “holy” in horror? Can an atheist and a theologian, generations apart, find moving ideas in the same movies? Can theology be popular reading? Zachary Gordon, associate academic editor at InterVarsity, set out to find answers to these questions in a new series, Discovering God in Pop Culture, debuting in September.
“Instead of getting bogged down in questions of whether or not it is okay for Christians to engage with pop culture, or simply identifying religious themes therein, we wanted to focus on how Christian faith can be made better or deepened by engagement with pop culture,” Gordon, who is acquiring editor for the series, tells PW.
The series coeditors—Kutter Callaway, an assistant professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary, and Matthew William Brake, associate professor of philosophy and religion at Northern Virginia Community College—intend forthcoming titles to address film, music, books and more.
Callaway is also the author of the first title in the series, Be Afraid: What Horror Reveals About Facing the Darkness (Sept.). For Gordon, the book demonstrates that “informed engagement with horror can be redemptive because—surprisingly to some—the Bible, in many places, belongs squarely in the horror genre.”
For Callaway’s part, he says his goal for the book is to offer readers “a more honest relationship with darkness—their own and the world’s.”
As he points out, “Our liturgies, our sermons, our whole formation tends to rush us from Good Friday to Easter without actually letting us stay in the tomb. And the result is that when people encounter real darkness—grief, fear, trauma, moral complexity—they feel like something has gone wrong with their faith. When actually, the Christian faith was always meant to be a reg, and trauma-filled world.”
Two more as-yet-untitled books are now under contract for the series.
The first is by Soong-Chan Rah, a professor of evangelism at Fuller Theological Seminary, and his son Elijah Rah, an avant garde recording artist, who will explore their varied insights on popular contemporary movies with a book set for Spring 2027. And Andrea Robinson, a professor at Huntsville Bible College, has a title planned for fall 2028 “on how anime can help us discover purpose and meaning in this lifeand about how it can help challenge us to pursue character development and personal ethics in the present time, rather than viewing the Christian hope simply as a ‘get out of jail free’ card for the afterlife,” says Gordon.
