Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology (Challenges in Contemporary Theology)

Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology (Challenges in Contemporary Theology) by Loughlin, Gerard. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780631211808.

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. Discusses various films, including the Alien quartet, Christopher Nolans Memento, Stanley Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, Nicolas Roegs The Man Who Fell to Earth and Derek Jarmans The Garden. Draws on a wide range of authors, both ancient and modern, religious and secular, from Plato to Levinas, from Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar to André Bazin and Leo Bersani. Uses cinema to think about the church as an ecclesiacinema, and films to think about sexual desire as erotic dispossession, as a way into the life of God. Written from a radically orthodox Christian perspective, at once both Catholic and critical.