W inning both the Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival 2019 and Best Picture-along with Best Directing, Script, and International Feature Film-at the 2020 Oscars, Parasite achieved unprecedented international success for a South Korean film. It is even more striking to find that a film shot entirely in the Korean language with South Korean production received the highest honor at the Oscars, a generally domestic film festival in the United States. Admittedly, the filmmaker, Bong Joonho, 1 was not only already a top-tier director in South Korea, but also a reputable auteur of cinema who had gained international fame since the early 2000s and made major films in the United States, including Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017). The mastery of Bong's filmmaking is evident: storytelling that can grab the audience "by the collar and shake them up," 2 a detail-oriented cinematography, and impeccable editing that deserves textbook status at film schools. That said, the triumph of Parasite goes beyond Bong's previous successes in the field of international film festivals and art houses, and beyond his existing accomplishments as a filmmaker. Parasite speaks to the broader public because its narrative is centered on the practice of today's ubiquitous religion, global capitalism. The relationship between religion and capitalism, or capitalism as a religion, is a classic subject of religious studies, since Max Weber's The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism. Among many other works on religion and capitalism, I draw particularly on Walter Benjamin's 1921 fragment, "Capitalism as Religion." Benjamin's fragment was published in 1985, long after his death, and it is an incomplete piece of writing that Religion of Mammon and Parasite Although Bong has a Catholic background-his baptismal name is "Michael"-he hardly uses religious elements in his films except for a small number of depictions of Korean Protestant evangelicals. 8 Parasite is

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This essay introduces Arlene Anderson Swidler (1929–2008), a passionate Catholic feminist writer, lecturer, activist, and scholar of religion. As a part of the post-Vatican II wave, her writings on women in the Catholic Church began to appear as early as 1966. Although her feminist ideas are rooted in Catholicism, they later related to other religions as well. Thus, her activity can be understood as “ecumenical feminism.”

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