Imaging Otherness explores relationships between film and religion, aesthetics and ethics. The volume examines these relationships by viewing how otherness is imaged in film and how otherness alternately might be imagined. Drawing from a variety of films from differing religious perspectives -- including Chan Buddhism, Hinduism, Native American religions, Christianity, and Judaism -- the essays gathered in this volume examine the particular problems of 'living together' when faced with the tensions brought out through the otherness of differing sexualities, ethnicities, genders, (...) religions, cultures, and families. (shrink)

Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics is an innovative attempt to reconceive the key concepts of religious studies through a reading with, and against, Walter Benjamin. Brent Plate deftly sifts through Benjamin's voluminous writings showing how his concepts of art, allegory, and experience undo traditional religious concepts such as myth, symbol, memory, narrative, creation, and redemption. Recasting religion as religious practice, as process and movement, Plate locates a Benjaminian materialist aesthetics, what the author calls an "allegorical aesthetics," in order to uncover (...) sources and establish a new locus for the study of religion. Placing the concept of an allegorical aesthetics into practice, Plate offers examinations of aesthetic productions such as Daniel Libeskind's architecture and Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades alongside religious developments such as the Hindu Bhakti movement and Jewish Kabbalistic thought. Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics will be necessary reading for those interested in religion and the arts, aesthetics, and material culture. (shrink)