This book explicates how many films intersect black suffering and God-talk in ways that instantiate secular limitations to divine efficacy. The book’s concept of a modern God introduces a new method of analysis that reimagines theodical discourses as mechanisms of modern identities and filmmakers as skillful exegetes who recalibrate divine attributes to the sensemaking cadences of their contemporaries. Shayne Lee demonstrates how cinematic theodicy navigates a happy medium between affirming divine benevolence and sidelining supernatural activity and that filmic characters, like their real-world counterparts, are quite clever at triangulating rationality, faith, and tragedy. In addition to positing synergistic links between theodicy and secularity, Lee offers critical insights into cinema’s relevance to the sociology of evil by specifying how films code and narrate malevolent actions and outcomes, demarcate clear lines of distinction between victims and perpetrators, clarify societal dynamics driving inequality and oppression, and transform individual episodes of suffering into collective and memorialized identities of trauma. This book illuminates how filmic treatments of theodicy construct evil and suffering in calculated ways that connect specific acts, effects, and institutions to greater structures of meaning.

This book analyzes how films depict God when black characters experience suffering and tragedy to elucidate how cinema often portrays a God that is considered supportive, yet who does little to mitigate suffering. This sparks theodical contemplation on the role of divinity in protecting people from the consequences of human depravity.

"In this book, Delphine Letort illuminates the intertwining of fiction and history in the TV series adaptation of The Underground Railroad. Letort highlights the narrative and audio/visual strategies used by Barry Jenkins to make for an "affective moment" on television"--

Earthquake and the Invention of America: The Making of Elsewhere Catastrophe explores the role of earthquakes in shaping the deep timeframes and multi-hemispheric geographies of American literary history. Spanning the ancient world to the futuristic continents of speculative fiction, the earthquake stories assembled here together reveal the emergence of a broadly Western cultural syndrome that became an acute national fantasy: elsewhere catastrophe, an unspoken but widely prevalent sense that catastrophe is somehow "un-American." Catastrophe must be elsewhere because it affirms the rightness of "here" where conquest, according to the syndrome's logic, did not happen and is not occurring. The psychic investment in elsewhere catastrophe coalesced slowly, across centuries; varieties of it can be found in various European traditions of the modern. Yet in its most striking modes and resonances, elsewhere catastrophe proves fundamental to the invention of US-America--which is why earthquake, as the exemplary elsewhere catastrophe, is the disaster that must always happen far away or be forgotten. The book's eight chapters and epilogue range from Plato to the Puritans, from El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Voltaire to Herman Melville and N.K. Jemisin, examining along the way the seismic imaginings of Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, and Jose Martí, among other writers. At the core of the book's inquiries are the earthquakes, historical and imagined, that act as both a recurrent eruptive force and a provocation for disparate modes of critical engagement with the long and catastrophic history of the Americas.

From struggles over identity politics in the 1990s to current concerns about a clash of civilizations between Islam and Christianity, culture wars play a prominent role in the twenty-first century. Movies help to define and drive these conflicts by both reflecting and shaping cultural norms, as well as showing what violates those norms. In this pathfinding book, Daniel S. Cutrara employs queer theory, cultural studies, theological studies, and film studies to investigate how cinema represents and often denigrates religion and religious believers—an issue that has received little attention in film studies, despite the fact that faith in its varied manifestations is at the heart of so many cultural conflicts today. Wicked Cinema examines films from the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, including Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Circle, Breaking the Waves, Closed Doors, Agnes of God, Priest, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Dogma. Central to all of the films is their protagonists' struggles with sexual transgression and traditional belief systems within Christianity, Judaism, or Islam—a struggle, Cutrara argues, that positions believers as the Other and magnifies the abuses of religion while ignoring its positive aspects. Uncovering a hazardous web of ideological assumptions informed by patriarchy, the spirit/flesh dichotomy, and heteronormativity, Cutrara demonstrates that ultimately these films emphasize the "Otherness" of the faithful through a variety of strategies commonly used to denigrate the queer, from erasing their existence, to using feminization to make them appear weak, to presenting them as dangerous fanatics.

Socrates and Dionysus engages and seeks to redraw the boundaries between philosophy and poetry, science and art. Friedrich Nietzsche argues in his work The Birth of Tragedy that science conquers art, especially the tragic art of the Dionysian poet of ancient Greece. Appealing to the natural, primeval self that is suppressed but not extinguished by the knowledge of culture, Dionysian tragedy establishes contact with our bodies and their deepest longings. Science and philosophy, associated with the ‘Socratism’ of the theoretical man, celebrate the human mind in particular and the mind or rationality of the universe more generally. According to Nietzsche, it is Euripides who destroys the Dionysian entirely. Euripides celebrated the unadorned individual because only the individual, separated from their god, is intelligible or accessible to human reason; he insisted that art be comprehended by mind or that it be rationally understood. Euripides was possessed of such a rationalizing drive, Nietzsche claims, because his primary audience was Socrates. It is Socrates, therefore, who is the true opponent of Dionysus. Following Nietzsche’s bifurcation between philosophy and art, postmodern political philosopher Richard Rorty rejects the tendency of philosophy to posit absolute, universal truths and turns to the concept of ‘redescription’ which he associates with the ‘wisdom of the novel’. The novel is wise because it posits the relative truths and perspectives of the various individuals, societies and cultures that it represents. As an art form, it can therefore include every possible perspective of every particular situation, event or person. New interdisciplinary fields in politics, literature and film are giving rise to an expanding community of scholars who disagree with the approaches taken by Nietzsche and Rorty. These scholars are shedding light on the ways in which philosophy and art are friends rather than enemies. They seek to bridge the theoretical and ethical gaps between the world of ‘fiction’ and the world of ‘fact’, of art and science. There appears to be a fundamental tension between literary-artistic and scientific projects. Whereas the artist seeks to recreate human experience, thereby evoking basic ethical issues, the scientist apparently seeks ethically-neutral, evidence-based facts as the constituents of our knowledge of reality. Chapters in this volume, however, will reconsider how artists, philosophers and film-makers have addressed and attempted to reconcile the artist’s language of normativity and the scientist’s language of facticity.

Bible and Cinema: Fifty Key Films introduces a wide range of those movies - among the most important, critically-acclaimed and highest-grossing films of all time - which have drawn inspiration, either directly or indirectly, from the Bible.

These texts represent both the formation of visual culture, and the ways in which it has transformed, and continues to transform, our understanding and experience of the world as a visual domain.

"In 2012, the year 1433 of the Muslim calendar, the Islamic population throughout the world was estimated at approximately a billion and a half, representing about one-fifth of humanity. In geographical terms, Islam occupies the center of the world, stretching like a big belt across the globe from east to west."--P. vii.