Film and the Afterlife

David Rankin is an ordained minister of the Uniting Church in Australia and has served as both Principal of Trinity College Queensland, Australia, and Head of the School of Theology at Griffith University, Australia. His publications in the field include Tertullian and the Church (1995), From Clement to Origen (2006), Athenagoras (2009), and The Early Church and the Afterlife (2017).

• Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1 The Stages of the Afterlife; 2 Continuity and Identity in the Afterlife; 3 The Form and Nature of Existence in the Afterlife; 4 Contact between worlds?; Conclusion; Appendix A Book to Film Adaptations; Appendix B The Intermediate Space in Religious Traditions; Appendix C Continuity of Personal Identity into the Afterlife; Appendix D A Mind Only World?; Subject Index

"Film and the Afterlife appears in the theologically grounded "Routledge Studies in Religion and Film Series." Rankin (an Australia-based academic and minister) establishes a dialogue among films, theological traditions, and sundry forms of research (e.g., neuroscience, sociology) to ascertain what popular culture showcases as afterlife. Mostly exploring liminal spaces between life and death, Rankin examines such commercially successful films as Ghost and Sixth Sense and also less familiar ones, such as Dragonfly. (But where is the wildly comic This Is the End?) The author strategically attends to them as texts worthy to be understood on their own terms as he explores such fascinating subjects as whether inhabitants of such liminal spaces need to resolve unfinished business before moving on (ideally upward) and prevailing archetypal tropes of heaven, e.g., light. He deals with various stages of the afterlife, continuity between the stages and what personal identity in the afterlife might look like, depictions of post-death existence of mind and embodiment, possibilities of communication between the worlds of the quick and the dead, and, finally, the understanding of the purpose and meaning of the afterlife for spectators of the films."- T. Lindvall, Virginia Wesleyan University, CHOICE