Religion in Contemporary Thought and Cinema : Paragraph, Volume 42, Issue 3

Probes intersections between contemporary cinema and diverse theoretical, philosophical and theological engagements with religion.

The special issue responds to two concurrent phenomena: the re-emergence in the 21st century of religion as a political and cultural force, and its resurgence in a range of theoretical discourses, from postsecularism to New Atheism.

Mirroring this theoretical and cultural turn, cinema across the world is renewing its acquaintance with religion as private practice, public display and political force and exploring overlapping material, spiritual and doctrinal concerns in the new millennium. This issue probes intersections between contemporary cinema and diverse theoretical, philosophical and theological engagements with religion.

It compares cinema's capacity to present visual expressions of faith, evoke embodied experience and varied modalities of love, correlate earthly and divine realities and inspire belief and doubt with writings on religion and postsecularism.

Contributors explore ideas about transcendence, vocation, affliction, love, doubt and forms of religious practice and expression that connect specific films with theoretical accounts that look beyond the secular. Key Features Covers a wide range of cinemas from the United States, France, Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia and China. Juxtaposes responses to Judaeo-Christian thought with Islamic feminism, theology from the Arab-speaking world and Buddhist ethics. Situates recent films within traditions of idiosyncratic thinking about God that stretch back to the work of Soren Kierkegaard and Simone Weil. Challenges the established (male, white) canon of religious film criticism and filmmakers, from Carl Theodor Dreyer and Robert Bresson to Bruno Dumont and Lars von Trier.