A tour de force not just for cinephiles and students of religion, Coen: Framing Religion in Amoral Order is compelling reading for anyone seeking meaning, identity, and purpose in the contemporary world. Each chapter dives deeply into a Coen film, illuminating how the brothers, and by implication, all of us, tease transcendence from the heartbreak of everyday life.
~Diane Winston, Knight Chair in Media and Religion, University of Southern California
The Coen brothers are not just two of our finest filmmakers, but two key figures in the making of American mythology. Elijah Siegler and the splendid team of scholars he has assembled for this volume help us to better understand the vision and films of the Coens. This is a marvelous book, as much about our American selves as it is about religion and film.
~Amir Hussain, Professor of Theological Studies, Loyola Marymount University and Editor, Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Elegantly conceived and consistently provocative, this is the definitive work on the religious and moral aspects of the Coen Brothers oeuvre. In their range and dexterity, these essays work with the Coens’ capacious irony. In turning each of their movies anew, the collection sheds light on the particular genius of two American masters.
~John Modern, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Chair of Religious Studies, Franklin & Marshall College
Taken as a whole, the essays in Coen offer a lively conversation (indeed, the contributors edited one another’s essays, and several of the published texts contain helpful intertextual comments) about the ways in which filmmakers, audiences, and scholars all imagine interactions between film and religion. As a compilation of criticism on the Coen filmography, the collection organizes and reframes an expansive bibliography. As works of scholarship on religion, its essays imaginatively connect critical theory of religion with cinema studies scholarship, applied in clever and illuminating readings of the Coens’ oeuvre.
~Geoffrey Pollick, The Revealer
...[ Coen] offers an unexpected number of insights beyond the Coens and their films.
~Christian Wessely, Journal for Religion, Film and Media
This immensely readable work is a stunning success of eloquent writers tackling riveting topics. Each of the Coen brothers’ movies, the hilarious and the harrowing treated in chronological order, receives careful critical analysis that sheds blazing light on the dark genius of these filmmakers.
~Terry Lindvall, Journal of the American Academy of Religion
A work that sets out in search of the Coens’ cinematic soul and returns with a raft of compelling insights
~Richard Goodwin, Journal of Religion and Film
Structured in three ‘acts’, the collection presents three different ways in which the films of Joel and Ethan Coen view the study of religion. The Coens’ own religiosity is not the central object of the study, but the light which each of the films in the Coens’ canon shed on both the tasks and categories of religious inquiry.
~Myles Werntz, Perspectives in Religious Studies
