Religious Imaginations Films


We use the phrase ‘religious imaginations’ to highlight the variety of ways in which believers interact with the world. Religions have recognisable patterns, but are not uniform, and it’s impossible to capture the full essence of religious beliefs in short films.

In these films, we focus on some key concepts within the six featured religious imaginaries, and aim to build understanding of unifying and diverse elements across world faith traditions.

Providing resources to support basic knowledge of religious traditions has been foundational to the work of the LSE Faith Centre. It’s commonplace for a lack of basic religious literacy to diminish understanding between people in multifaith contexts, including the workplace, and this hampers policymakers in addressing major geopolitical issues.

With the support of Culham St Gabriel’s Trust, we offer these six short films as a basic resource for use by students, companies, and public service departments. They’re not comprehensive, nor are they there to present detailed knowledge of individual faiths, but they are a starting point for developing religious literacy skills. 

Suffering: The Buddhist Imagination Suffering: The Buddhist Imagination
This video explores key concepts in Buddhism. LSE Faith Centre

 

Kingdom: The Christian Imagination Kingdom: The Christian Imagination
This video explores key concepts in Christianity. LSE Faith Centre

 

Dharma: The Hindu Imagination Dharma: The Hindu Imagination
This video explores key concepts in Hinduism. LSE Faith Centre

 

Revelation: The Islamic Imagination Revelation: The Islamic Imagination
This video explores key concepts in Islam. LSE Faith Centre

 

Covenant: The Jewish Imagination Covenant: The Jewish Imagination
This video explores key concepts in Judaism. LSE Faith Centre

 

Justice: The Sikh Imagination Justice: The Sikh Imagination
This video explores key concepts in Sikhi. LSE Faith Centre

 

 

A Note On Our Approach

We encourage these films to be watched in company as a primer to deeper conversations about how religious shows up in your workplaces, networks and in the lives of your colleagues and friends.  

Faith is so personal to people and it’s inevitable that some believers will watch “their” film and say ‘well, I wouldn’t present like that, or I think they got that wrong.’

What we have attempted to do is identify an important theme within each tradition and started to show how it is worked out in the lives of millions of followers. In particular, we’re trying to show how we might see these diverse expressions of faith as operating within a recognisable framework of thought and values. Religious expression is diverse, but it is still possible to describe the character of these traditions. 

That’s what we mean by imagination. We’ve tried to explain that by imagination we don’t mean ‘imagined unreality’. We’re pointing to the fact that religion isn’t a set of precepts or even just a set of social practices, it’s a whole world that people inhabit, shaping their thinking and behaviours in relation to society, politics, economics and absolutely everything else. Imagination is our most expansive framing of the world in which we live.