S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

S. Brent Rodriguez Plate, is a writer, public speaker, editor, and part-time college professor whose books include A History of Religion in 5 1/2 Objects, Blasphemy: Art that Offends, and Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World. His essays have been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Christian Century, The Islamic Monthly, Huffington Post, Killing the Buddha, and elsewhere. He is a board member of the Interfaith Coalition of Greater Utica, NY, President of the Association for Religion and Intellectual Life/CrossCurrents, and managing editor of Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief. He holds a visiting appointment at Hamilton College, NY. Twitter: @splate1

Articles

Religion Dispatches

“Cult” Cinema Comes of Age

While Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master provides the latest (and greatest) vantage point, 2011 saw the release of three solid films on the topic. Why now?

S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

October 9, 2012

Article

Religion Dispatches

The Eternal in the Blink of an Eye, Chris Marker (1921-2012)

The reclusive filmmaker understood that the truth of history, like myth, can only be approached as a sensual experience.

S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

August 6, 2012

Article

Religion Dispatches

Looking at Death: Images of 9/11, Before, During, and After

What might it mean for a synagogue, a church, a mosque, or a temple, to set up a video screen in its sanctuary and play these images of death from September 11—and then turn around and respond to them? What reinvented rituals might result from a ritualized, contextualized reception of these images? Such communal framing gets us beyond the questions of morbid voyeurism because it eliminates the one-way dimension and places images within a social setting. It further allows us to reflect and come to terms with dying, thereby stirring the potential for a good death.

S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

April 17, 2012

Article