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Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology (Challenges in Contemporary Theology)
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$ 50.83
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| Item Number |
155085 |
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Item Description...
Product Description
Gerard Loughlin is one of the leading theologians working at the interface between religion and contemporary culture. In this exceptional work, he uses cinema and the films it shows to think about the church and the visions of desire it displays. In the figure of the alien, Loughlin finds a metaphor for that which is both most feared and desired: the body and its cravings. Secular culture follows St Augustine in thinking sex an alien force within the body. But the ancient church also found in sex the presence of a yet stranger desire that secularity forgets: the divine eros that is always other to us even as it draws us into its embrace. In God we find that which is both infinitely alien and intimate to ourselves. Alien Sex explores the Christian tradition of 'sacred eroticism' from Gregory of Nyssa to Hans Urs von Balthasar. Through a close reading of such films as The Devils, Breaking the Waves and Derek Jarmans The Garden, Loughlin shows how Christianity calls us to view sexuality from the perspective of heaven, not in order to escape the body but to encounter it more intensively. Through desire of the body we regain paradise.
Book Description
Gerard Loughlin is one of the leading theologians working at the interface between religion and contemporary culture. In this exceptional work, he uses cinema and the films it shows to think about the church and the visions of desire it displa.
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Item Specifications...
Pages 336
Dimensions: Length: 8.98" Width: 6.06" Height: 0.99"
Weight: 1.08 lbs.
Binding Softcover
Publisher Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN 0631211802
EAN 9780631211808
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Availability 100 units.
Availability accurate as of Feb 12, 2012 05:05.
Usually ships within one to two business days from La Vergne, TN.
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Reviews - What do our customers think?
 | Scintillating...no, really May 13, 2008 |
I first encountered a portion of this book in the controversial Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology produced by Routledge (titled "Erotics: God's Sex"). There are some interesting essays in that volume, but Loughlin's was simultaneously one of the most accessible and one of the most provocative. Any theologian who can start a theological piece by pointing to the prurient preoccupations of Georges Bataille and then plausibly bring the trajectory around full circle to champion the Trinitarian eros of Dante's Commedia is a creative theologian, if nothing else.
Bringing together his Radical Orthodox sensibilities, his Roman Catholic insistence on Incarnational faith and the sacramentality of creation (including desire and the flesh), and his interests in queer theory, Loughlin conducts the reader through this seemingly disparate triad of interests - God, sex, and the movies - and helps the reader to see the pulsing, luminous desire for the Other that flows through each of them. His commentaries on films such as The Exorcist, A Clockwork Orange, and Alien are interspersed with reflections on philosophers and theologians from Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa to Roland Barthes and Slavoj Zizek.
If you read this book in public, you might want to find a cover for it. But the forbidden desires of Alien Sex are well worth the transgression. In an age when the Church and theology are often bifurcated into the same stale antinomies between fundamentalist and liberal, right-wing and left-wing, Loughlin offers an unwaveringly Trinitarian vision of reality that simultaneously challenges the patriarchy and heteronormativity of the institutional church. If you're tired of the repugnant imperial theology of much of the Christian Right but leery of the cavalier attitude toward orthodox dogma of much of the Christian Left, Loughlin's radically orthodox theology of desire might be a refreshing respite. | | | Write your own review about Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology (Challenges in Contemporary Theology)
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