Page - 125 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/01

Bulletproof Love: Luke Cage (2016) and Religion | 125www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/1, 123–155 Annual conferences of large academic societies are typically, by their very na- ture, slow to respond to current events. the logistics in putting together such meetings are incredibly complex, the result being that the planning of sessions begins up to a year before the meeting takes place. to its credit, the American Academy of religion (AAr) has been sensitive to this issue, and has endeav- ored to open up ways in which scholars can offer analyses of more recent phe- nomena. At the November 2016 meeting of the AAr in san Antonio, texas, for example, several sessions were offered in response to the results of the U.S. presidential election that had taken place just slightly more than a week earlier. With this sense of timeliness in mind, members of the AAr’s religion, film, and Visual Culture (rfVC) group approached the director of the annual meet- ing, Dr. robert Puckett, about scheduling a last-minute roundtable discussion of the first season of the superhero series Luke Cage (Netflix, US 2016), released in October 2016.1 Not only is Luke the first Black superhero to be featured in his own comic book and his own television show, but the Netflix portrayal of him in a hoodie, being shot at by police (fig. 1), was clearly meant to resonate instantly with critically important, and deeply troubling, of-the-moment occurrences. he is, in the words of Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield, “the first Black Lives Matter superhero”.2 1 in this regard the authors would like to thank Dr. syed Adnan hussain (of st. Mary’s University in hali- fax), one of the members of the religion, film, and Visual Culture group, for the inspiration to propose this session. 2 Sheffield 2016. Fig. 1: Film still, “DWYCK”, Luke Cage (2016), S01/E09, 19:10.