Religion In Contemporary European Cinema

The religious landscape in Europe is changing dramatically. While the authority of institutional religion has weakened, a growing number of people now desire individualized religious and spiritual experiences, finding the self-complacency of secularism unfulfilling. The crisis of religion is itself a form of religious life. A sense of complex, subterraneous interaction between religious, heterodox, secular and atheistic experiences has thus emerged, which makes the phenomenon all the more fascinating to study, and this is what Religion in Contemporary European Cinema does. The book explores the mutual influences, structural analogies, shared dilemmas, as well as the historical roots of such a post-secular constellation as seen through the lens of European cinema. Bringing together scholars from film theory and political science, ethics and philosophy of religion, philosophy of film and theology, this volume casts new light on the relationship between the religious and secular experience after the death of the death of God. Review: Bradatan...sets the stage for the 11 contributions when he states that secular worldviews, along with the rise to prominence of the modern nation-state, are often imagined to be 'intellectually insufficient and seen as offering existentially poor options.' To the contrary, cinema, as the authors here all rightly know, has always been linked with the sacred. The essays in this collection all find ways these linkages are occurring. - S. Brent Plate, Hamilton College, USA in the Los Angeles Review of Books