“From aesthetic to religious experience, Eyes Wide Open is a winner.”
William Romanowski’s Eyes Wide Open has been one of the most-used Christian college textbooks on popular culture. This revised and expanded second edition is now even more useful for students. It has been expanded to delve more deeply into how Christians can most profitably and critically hear, read, and view popular culture; it more clearly explains how popular culture is art; and it furthers the discussion on media sex and violence. All of the chapters have been updated with fresh examples from the world of film and popular music. Other helpful additions include documenting endnotes, a bibliography, an index, study questions, and end-of-chapter summaries.
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ENDORSEMENTS
“This revised and expanded edition of Eyes Wide Open, already a standard on the topic, widens and deepens the discourse on the popular entertainment arts. Readers will find in William Romanowski’s imaginative and down-to-earth approach to popular art as art a manifesto of Christian involvement and a matrix assessment of sights and sounds that inescapably shape our everyday life.” — Scott Young, Founder, City of Angels Film Festival
“When Eyes Wide Open first came out we celebrated! It was just the text we were looking for. In our media-saturated age we felt we needed a resource that could both equip students to understand the nature of the genres they consume and give them the ‘eyes’ to bring appropriate critique as well. Romanowski's book has done that for us and more. At Geneva College, we have used it for the last several years in one of our core classes. How could we be anything but enthusiastic to see the new edition? As a sociologist I struggle to get my students to see how their own habits connect to the broader society in which they live, what C. Wright Mills called the 'sociological imagination.' I have seldom seen a resource that makes that happen like Romanowski's book. His scholarship is impeccable, his writing is engaging, and his faith perspective is compelling. I not only teach from it but I deeply enjoy it and highly recommend it.” — Bradshaw Frey, Geneva College
“I have used Eyes Wide Open as a companion text in my Introduction to Mass Communication course. Students find Romanowski’s cogent synthesis of complex theological and philosophical concepts both accessible and engaging. Simply put, the book helps students to ‘think Christianly’ about faith and culture in meaningful ways—ways that challenge overly simplistic sacred-secular dichotomies that tend to prevent Christians from critical participation in contemporary culture. Romanowski’s work articulates in a compelling way how a faith-based perspective can function as the filter for our consumption, critique, and even creation of popular art and culture. Regardless of your church background, this book should resonate at some level.” — Robert Woods, Spring Arbor University
Eyes Wide Open provides clear biblical insights, accessible aesthetic criteria, and challenging approaches to what is often our all too casual interaction with popular culture. Romanowski’s book provides an excellent tool for students to learn the skills to navigate ‘the world behind the art.’ Over the last several years Eyes Wide Open has become the favorite text of our students. They find it interesting, relevant, and easy to discuss and apply. And with this updated version that links the examples to the most recent experience of students, I’m sure it will continue to be enthusiastically embraced. So give it a try—you’ll laugh, you’ll cry—it’s better than Cats.” — Terry Thomas, Geneva College
“As a professor of popular culture at a faith-based university, I find Eyes Wide Open an ideal text. It has academic rigor yet does not overwhelm undergraduates; it has strong theology yet does not rely upon a Christian readership. Without compromising scholarship, Bill Romanowski is able to make abstract ideas concrete with clear and compelling explanations, specific illustrations, and accessible language. He has done professors and students a great favor and has gone a long way in equipping the next generation of culture makers as agents of change and agents of grace.” — Monica Ganas, Azusa Pacific University
Reviews & Awards
2002 ECPA (Evangelical Chrisitan Publisher’s Association) Gold Medallion Award Winner - Christianity and Society
“A revised, expanded edition of a standard best-selling survey of spirituality in the entertainment world. Here’s a Christian perspective on the popular arts which lends well to any Christian library: a survey which blends theological analysis on culture and the arts with admonitions to Christians to find God in music, movies and popular culture. From aesthetic to religious experience, Eyes Wide Open is a winner, especially for college-level spirituality collections." —California Bookwatch
“This thorough expansion of [Eyes Wide Open] contains new examples and new insights, securing its status as the standard for classroom works on culture.” —Steve Rabey, Youthworker Journal
“An easy reading volume on popular culture. While it is used as a college text, it offers a practical way to evaluate movies, music, and television programs. This book will increase your understanding of the world and will help you to address the culture in a pertinent way.” —bookbargainsandpreviews.com
“The book has been thoroughly updated since its first printing in 2001, and resources, including an index and study questions, have been added. Each chapter is infused with references to, and often significant treatment of, recent controversies and additions to the pop culture landscape…. There is much here to recommend. [Romanowski’s] nuanced and comprehensive treatment of the topic…provides plenty of rich fodder for a small group—and for all of us who consume culture like nobody’s business (let alone Jesus’).” —Laurel Rae Mathewson, Sojourners
“Romanowski has added additional material, clarified his arguments, and updated many of the illustrations to include more contemporary examples. Unlike some ‘expanded’ editions, this volume has actually undergone substantial revision, and Romanowski has added almost one hundred pages of additional material . . . . Romanowski’s work has much to commend it. His critique of evangelical approaches to popular arts is insightful. . . . Romanowski has produced a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate about how Christians can best understand and interact with popular art. This volume convincingly argues for an approach to art that takes seriously both the artist’s perspective and a Christian worldview. Additionally, it is written in an accessible manner without oversimplifying the often complicated arguments that surround discussion of appropriate Christian cultural engagement. This volume is easily recommended for undergraduate level classes, as well as for church people struggling to understand how to think about popular art from a Christian perspective.” —Jacob Christian, Stone-Campbell Journal
“If [the] notion of watching movies in a uniquely Christian fashion is new to you…Eyes Wide Open: Looking for God in Popular Culture remains the best introduction….Every church library should have this book on hand; youth leaders, young adult ministries, college fellowship leaders, and anyone interested in the popular arts should own it….This is an excellent study.” —Byron Borger, heartsandmindsbooks.com
“Romanowski has written an important book for those seeking to understand the relationship between popular culture and God. . . . This is one of the best books on this subject I have read over the last few years. This revised edition is strengthened and updated, and I recommend you skip a few movies and give this a read.” —Jerry Holsopple, Third Way Café, Media Matters, Mennonite Media.
“. . . this new edition is worth noting as substantial expansion and improvement on the original while continuing to serve as a scholarly corrective to the simplistic, moralistic and ideologically driven criticism that arises all too readily from evangelical circles. . . . Romanowski also writes with a healthy sense of humility, and he spends too much time acknowledging and challenging the blind spots of evangelicals to lapse into cheap sanctimony. In this respect, the value of Eyes Wide Open goes beyond that of a book by a Christian scholar written for other Christians. For those who are either wary or curious about evangelicals, it is an accessible entry point to a side of the evangelical world that is often overshadowed by the caustic rhetoric of the religious right.” —Journal of Media and Religion
“Perceptive engagement with popular culture from Evangelicals in the academy is a fairly new phenomenon, and Eyes Wide Open is the best available. It is accessible enough for use in undergraduate classes. Students and teachers of any or no faith interested in the evangelical Christian perspective as it relates to popular culture would benefit from this text.” —Journal of Popular Culture