Customer Reviews

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

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I first encountered a portion of this book in the controversial Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology produced by Routledge (titled "Erotics: God's Sex"). There are some interesting essays in that volume, but Loughlin's was simultaneously one of the most accessible and one of the most provocative. Any theologian who can start a theological piece by pointing to the prurient preoccupations of Georges Bataille and then plausibly bring the trajectory around full circle to champion the Trinitarian eros of Dante's Commedia is a creative theologian, if nothing else.

Bringing together his Radical Orthodox sensibilities, his Roman Catholic insistence on Incarnational faith and the sacramentality of creation (including desire and the flesh), and his interests in queer theory, Loughlin conducts the reader through this seemingly disparate triad of interests - God, sex, and the movies - and helps the reader to see the pulsing, luminous desire for the Other that flows through each of them. His commentaries on films such as The Exorcist, A Clockwork Orange, and Alien are interspersed with reflections on philosophers and theologians from Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa to Roland Barthes and Slavoj Zizek.

If you read this book in public, you might want to find a cover for it. But the forbidden desires of Alien Sex are well worth the transgression. In an age when the Church and theology are often bifurcated into the same stale antinomies between fundamentalist and liberal, right-wing and left-wing, Loughlin offers an unwaveringly Trinitarian vision of reality that simultaneously challenges the patriarchy and heteronormativity of the institutional church. If you're tired of the repugnant imperial theology of much of the Christian Right but leery of the cavalier attitude toward orthodox dogma of much of the Christian Left, Loughlin's radically orthodox theology of desire might be a refreshing respite.