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Marveling Religion
Critical Discourses, Religion, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe
Edited by Jennifer Baldwin and Daniel White Hodge
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Book Presentation:
Marveling Religion: Critical Discourses, Religion, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe is an edited volume that explores the intersection of religion and cinema through the lenses of critical discourse. The focus of the shared inquiry are various films comprising the first three phases of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and corresponding Netflix series. The contributors explore various religious themes and how they intersect with culture through the canon on the MCU. The first part focuses on responses to the societal, governmental, and cultural context that solidified with clarity during the 2016 Presidential Election cycle in the United States and in the following administration. Additionally, it provides lenses and resources for engaging in productive public actions. Part two explores cultural resources of sustaining activism and resistance as well as some of the key issues at stake in public action. The third part centers on militarization and resistance to state violence. Taken in concert, these three sections work together to provide frames for understanding while also keeping us engaged in the concrete action to mobilize social change. The overarching aim of the volume is to promote critical discourse regarding the dynamics of activism and political resistance.
About the authors:
Jennifer Baldwin is director of Grounding Flight Wellness Center, Woodstock, Georgia. Her primary area of scholarship is the intersection of traumatology and systematic theology. Daniel White Hodge is associate professor of intercultural communication and chair of the communication arts department at North Park University in Chicago, Illinois.
Press Reviews:
Marveling Religion stands as a powerful text, and the questions and conversations posed by the writers are engaging and challenging in the best possible ways. They name how these films offer representation and diversity while also spotlighting spaces and elements that continue to uphold problematic ideologies and worldviews. Marvel narratives are multivalent in their reception and can act as a mirror or prophetic lens to the toxic and insidious elements of our culture, while also still being bound to it as a product of a cultural time and place. From a teaching standpoint, the essays in this collection are a strong tool for engaging the variety of questions posed in them. On a personal note, I have used several of the essays from this text in my freshman interdisciplinary seminars. They have offered my students a great space to be guided through wrestling with questions of technology, otherness, and the monstrous in relationship to films and characters they know well. Marveling Religion is an important and valuable text to use as a conversation starter and scaffolding piece.
― Journal of Religion and Film
See the publisher website: Lexington Books
> On a related topic:
Mutants, Androids, and Aliens (2025)
On Being Human in the Marvel Cinematic Universe
Entering the Multiverse (2024)
Perspectives on Alternate Universes and Parallel Worlds
Dir. Paul Booth
A Theological Jurisprudence of Speculative Cinema (2023)
Superheroes, Science Fictions and Fantasies of Modern Law
American Theology, Superhero Comics, and Cinema (2018)
The Marvel of Stan Lee and the Revolution of a Genre
Realizing the Witch (2015)
Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible
by Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers
Roman Catholicism in Fantastic Film (2011)
Essays on Belief, Spectacle, Ritual and Imagery
Dir. Regina Hansen
Face to Face with Angels (2010)
Images in Medieval Art and in Film
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