This issue's thematic focus on teaching eligious studies and ethics through short films originated in a conversation among the editors of this journal about our use of film in the university classroom: how do we pedagogically engage films, how do our research interests shape or enrich our pedagogical practices, or how is our scholarly engagement with film challenged by our teaching experiences? And how, in our pedagogy, do we take into account the particular logic of film, and especially the short film, as an audio-visual medium? Our decision to focus this conversation on our use of short films was motivated, as will become clear, by much the same rationale as is behind the use of short films in the classroom itself: their brevity allowed us to preview the material before our discussion so that we all shared the same point of departure, and the format of the short film encouraged focused reflection.