Jennifer Baldwin is director of Grounding Flight Wellness Center, Woodstock, Georgia. Her primary area of scholarship is the intersection of traumatology and systematic theology. Daniel White Hodge is associate professor of intercultural communication and chair of the communication arts department at North Park University in Chicago, Illinois.
Marveling Religion stands as a powerful text, and the questions and conversations posed by the writers are engaging and challenging in the best possible ways. They name how these films offer representation and diversity while also spotlighting spaces and elements that continue to uphold problematic ideologies and worldviews. Marvel narratives are multivalent in their reception and can act as a mirror or prophetic lens to the toxic and insidious elements of our culture, while also still being bound to it as a product of a cultural time and place. From a teaching standpoint, the essays in this collection are a strong tool for engaging the variety of questions posed in them. On a personal note, I have used several of the essays from this text in my freshman interdisciplinary seminars. They have offered my students a great space to be guided through wrestling with questions of technology, otherness, and the monstrous in relationship to films and characters they know well. Marveling Religion is an important and valuable text to use as a conversation starter and scaffolding piece.