In Krista Tippet's talkshow called A Return to the Mystery: Religion, Fantasy, and Entertainment, Tippett interviews Phyllis Tickle and Lynn Schofield Clark about religious themes in today's movies and television.
Phyllis Tickle, author of God-Talk in America, talks about the various ways that "nonfiction has been giving way to fiction and fantasy" and religion in such popular movies as The Matrix, Holes, The Lord of the Rings Series, Harry Potter, and the television show Touched by an Angel. Tickle describes The Matrix as "pure God talk". The last city in The Matrix is called Zion which relates to the Hebrew Bible, the savior of men is Neo, which means "new man", Neo is in love with Trinity, and Morpheous represents Biblical characters such as Moses and John the Baptist. The philosophic principle that comes from The Matrix is that we have no understandign of the human conscious. The matrix is everything in the world around us and it cannot be explained, but it has to be experienced for ourselves.
Tickle goes on to explain how Holes relates to the Old Testament. The kids are in the desert digging holes for doing crimes and the "evil has to be undone". The woman blesses the children and "God makes rain on that land for the first time in 100 years". In the first Lord of the Rings, Gandalf tells Frodo that "everybody has a purpose in this world". Then she goes on to talk about how Harry Potter is the Mary Poppins for the new generation and Harry Potter emphasizes that "life is as full of darkness as it is full of light". Tickle also talks about Touched by an Angel and how an angel always intervenes in human affairs.
Then, Tippett interviews Lynn Schofield Clark, author of From Angels to Aliens - Teenagers, the Media and the Supernatural. She talked about how for teens, "there are possibilities about what can exist, and they are aware that there are questions that cannot be answered either by religion or by science, and that they are intrigued by those questions and the media play with those questions by presenting possibilities". She mentions Buffy the Vampire Slayer and how it contains and crucial element of how caring adults intervene in Buffy's life. The next example given by Clark is Joan of Arcadia because it is about an average teen and how God appears to her in ordinary everyday people and tells her what to do. Clark says that "spiritual themes have strong appeal as teens struggle to find their identities".
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