This book sets a new trajectory for considering the intertwined relationship between theology and law. Through close readings of a range of popular Hollywood speculative fiction films—Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, Snyder’s Man of Steel, Lucas’s and Disney’s Star Wars, Nolan’s The Dark Knight & The Dark Knight Rises, Proyas’ I, Robot, Nolfi’s The Adjustment Bureau and Jackson’s The Hobbit—Timothy Peters explores how fictional worlds, particularly those that ‘make strange’ the world of the viewer, can render visible and make explicit the otherwise opaque theologies of modern law. The book offers a ke ... More

This book sets a new trajectory for considering the intertwined relationship between theology and law. Through close readings of a range of popular Hollywood speculative fiction films—Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, Snyder’s Man of Steel, Lucas’s and Disney’s Star Wars, Nolan’s The Dark Knight & The Dark Knight Rises, Proyas’ I, Robot, Nolfi’s The Adjustment Bureau and Jackson’s The Hobbit—Timothy Peters explores how fictional worlds, particularly those that ‘make strange’ the world of the viewer, can render visible and make explicit the otherwise opaque theologies of modern law. The book offers a key contribution to the fields of cultural legal studies, law and film and law and theology by considering speculative fiction (superheroes, science fiction, fantasy) as a way of revealing the theologies of modern law and legal theory. The overall narrative of the work marks a course from antagonism to reconciliation, from autonomy to reciprocity and from law to love. Throughout the work, the book draws on resources within the Christian theological tradition’s critical engagement with law, as a means for rethinking and reimagining our post-secular legal modernity—enabling both a deactivating and fulfilling of the law. In exploring speculative film’s estranged accounts of the mythos of modernity and modern law, it articulates an alternative theological jurisprudence based on a love that takes us beyond the law.