This book shows how institutional religion and the religiosity of political and cultural life provide a necessary dimension to Walter Benjamin, one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers. Lived religion surrounded Benjamin, whose upper-middle-class Jewish family celebrated Christmas and Hanukkah in Berlin as the turmoil of war, collapsing empires, and modern urban life gave rise to the Nazi regime that would destroy most of Europe’s Jews, including Benjamin himself. Documenting the vitality and diversity of religious life that surrounded Benjamin in Germany, France, and beyond, Brian Britt shows the extent to which religious communities and traditions, especially those of Christians, influenced his work. Britt surveys and analyzes the intellectual, cultural, and social contexts of religion in Benjamin’s world and broadens the religious frame around discussions of his work to include lived religion—the daily practices of ordinary people. Seeing religion around Benjamin requires looking at forms of life and institutions that he rarely discussed. As Britt shows, dramatic changes in religious practices, particularly in Berlin, reflected broader political and cultural currents that would soon transform the lives of all Europeans. An original perspective on the religious context of a thinker who habitually raised questions about the survival of religion in modernity, Religion Around Walter Benjamin contributes to wider discussions of religious tradition and secular modernity in religious and cultural studies. It provides a foundational overview and introduction to the context of Benjamin’s writing that will be appreciated by scholars and students alike.

Religion and cinema share a capacity for world making, ritualizing, mythologizing, and creating sacred time and space. Through cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing, and other production activities, film takes the world “out there” and refashions it. Religion achieves similar ends by setting apart particular objects and periods of time, telling stories, and gathering people together for communal actions and concentrated focus. The result of both cinema and religious practice is a re-created world: a world of fantasy, a world of ideology, a world we long to live in, or a world we wish to avoid at all costs. Religion and Film introduces readers to both religious studies and film studies by focusing on the formal similarities between cinema and religious practices and on the ways they each re-create the world. Explorations of film show how the cinematic experience relies on similar aesthetic devices on which religious rituals have long relied: sight, sound, the taste of food, the body, and communal experience. Meanwhile, a deeper understanding of the aesthetic nature of religious rituals can alter our understanding of film production. Utilizing terminology and theoretical insights from the study of religion as well as the study of film, Religion and Film shows that by paying attention to the ways films are constructed, we can shed new light on the ways religious myths and rituals are constructed and vice versa. This thoroughly revised and expanded new edition is designed to appeal to the needs of courses in religion as well as film departments. In addition to two new chapters, this edition has been restructured into three distinct sections that offer students and instructors theories and methods for thinking about cinema in ways that more fully connect film studies with religious studies.

This book shows how institutional religion and the religiosity of political and cultural life provide a necessary dimension to Walter Benjamin, one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers. Lived religion surrounded Benjamin, whose upper-middle-class Jewish family celebrated Christmas and Hanukkah in Berlin as the turmoil of war, collapsing empires, and modern urban life gave rise to the Nazi regime that would destroy most of Europe's Jews, including Benjamin himself. Documenting the vitality and diversity of religious life that surrounded Benjamin in Germany, France, and beyond, Brian Britt shows the extent to which religious communities and traditions, especially those of Christians, influenced his work. Britt surveys and analyzes the intellectual, cultural, and social contexts of religion in Benjamin's world and broadens the religious frame around discussions of his work to include lived religion--the daily practices of ordinary people. Seeing religion around Benjamin requires looking at forms of life and institutions that he rarely discussed. As Britt shows, dramatic changes in religious practices, particularly in Berlin, reflected broader political and cultural currents that would soon transform the lives of all Europeans. An original perspective on the religious context of a thinker who habitually raised questions about the survival of religion in modernity, Religion Around Walter Benjamin contributes to wider discussions of religious tradition and secular modernity in religious and cultural studies. It provides a foundational overview and introduction to the context of Benjamin's writing that will be appreciated by scholars and students alike.

Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics is an innovative and creative attempt to unsettle and reconceive the key concepts of religious studies through a reading with, and against, Walter Benjamin. Constructing what he calls an "allegorical aesthetics," Plate sifts through Benjamin's writings showing how his concepts of art, allegory, and experience undo traditionally stabilizing religious concepts such as myth, symbol, memory, narrative, creation, and redemption.

In the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin writes that his work is “related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it.” For a thinker so decisive to critical literary, cultural, political, and aesthetic writings over the past half-century, Benjamin’s relationship to theological matters has been less observed than it should, even despite a variety of attempts over the last four decades to illuminate the theological elements latent within his eclectic and occasional writings. Such attempts, though undeniably crucial to comprehending his thought, remain in need of deepened systematic analysis. In bringing together some of the most renowned experts from both sides of the Atlantic, Walter Benjamin and Theology seeks to establish a new site from which to address both the issue of Benjamin’s relationship with theology and all the crucial aspects that Benjamin himself grappled with when addressing the field and operations of theological inquiry.

Marking the centenary of Walter Benjamin's immensely influential essay, "Toward the Critique of Violence," this critical edition presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of modern political theory. The volume includes twenty-one notes and fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus encounter for the first time in English provocative arguments about law and violence advanced by Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich Unger, and Emil Lederer. A new translation of selections from Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence further illuminates Benjamin's critical program. The volume also includes, for the first time in any language, a bibliography Benjamin drafted for the expansion of the essay and the development of a corresponding philosophy of law. An extensive introduction and afterword provide additional context. With its challenging argument concerning violence, law, and justice—which addresses such topical matters as police violence, the death penalty, and the ambiguous force of religion—Benjamin's work is as important today as it was upon its publication in Weimar Germany a century ago.

This book follows the theme of sacred text from Benjamin's early writings on religion, Judaism, and language to the study of Baroque tragedy, modernism, history, and the Paris Arcades. All of these writings reflect a commentary on the idea of the sacred text in Western culture.