Colleen McDannell is Sterling M. McMurrin Professor of Religious Studies and Professor of History at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. She is the author of Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America and Heaven: A History.

Colleen McDannell has brought together an all-star cast of scholars to examine what happened when American Catholics went to the movies, what happened to them and to the movies. Movie screens were an extension of the streets and shrines of the American church, where Catholics struggling with the hard realities of American life encountered their deepest fears and wildest dreams. This fabulous book makes it clear that going to the movies was as formative of American Catholicism as going to church.