Unusual Classes is an occasional collection from The Dialog U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to instructing.
Identify after all:
“Road to Hell: The Apocalypse in Classical and Contemporary Forms”
What caused the theory for the path?
When Meghan R. Henning, a pupil of early Christianity, finished her 2014 ebook on how the concept that of hell advanced within the early Christian church, she sought after to broaden a path that tested how those visions of hell discovered their method into fresh media. Quickly after, she met Joseph Valenzano III, a verbal exchange pupil who research non secular rhetoric in movie and tv. The path “Road to Hell” was once born in 2015 as a collaboration between the 2. I’ve been instructing the path since 2020, which aligns with my analysis focal point on intersections of movie and tv manufacturing with geography and American tradition.
What does the path discover?
The path starts with the traditional Egyptian Guide of the Useless. It ends with the evangelical “hell houses” of the Twenty first-century United States that try to scare guests into salvation with horrific visions of secular sinners being dragged into hell. It’s a chronology that spans about 3,500 years.
Alongside the way in which, the path explores different variations of the afterlife, corresponding to the traditional Jewish thought of Sheol, Greek and Roman visions of Hades, Norse mythology’s Ragnarok, and the evolution of Christian ideas of hell and the end-times from the Gospels and the Guide of Revelation thru Dante’s Inferno, and the way most of these visions align with scholarly definitions of an apocalypse. In each and every of those classes, scholars examine those traditions towards fresh movie and tv that evoke the iconography and thematic content material of the ones apocalypses.
Scene from ‘Angel Heart’ that includes Robert De Niro as Louis Cyphre, a veiled connection with ‘Lucifer.’
Why is that this path related now?
Even out of doors of the Christian custom, hell is an idea this is by no means some distance from other people’s minds, and because no less than the Seventies, the end-times were part of mainstream American discourse. The general public have an concept of what hell or the end-times seem like, however few perceive the place those concepts come from, or how a lot the ones concepts are mediated through pop culture.
What’s a essential lesson from the path?
The photographs we see in books, TV presentations and flicks are part of a rhetorical custom that is going again hundreds of years. Working out the place the ones pictures come from and the way they’re utilized in fresh media is helping other people perceive the connection between precedent days and the prevailing day.
What fabrics does the path characteristic?
“Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature,” through Meghan R. Henning.
“Enraptured by Rapture: Production Context, Biblical Interpretation, and Evangelical Eschatology in The Rapture, Left Behind, and This is the End,” an October 2024 article within the Magazine of Faith & Movie through Robert G. Joseph, Laura M. Tringali and Meghan R. Henning.
“Giving the Devil His Due: Satan and Cinema,” edited through Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock and Regina M. Hansen.
What is going to the path get ready scholars to do?
By means of the semester’s finish, scholars entire their very own analyses in their selected historical apocalypse and fresh media with a last presentation. Like every excellent humanities lessons, Highway to Hell encourages its scholars to succeed in into the previous as a way to higher know the way truth is built within the provide.
