Religion and Popular Culture in America

Capa
Bruce David Forbes, Jeffrey H. Mahan
University of California Press, 2000 - 324 páginas
The connections between American popular culture and religion is the subject of this multifaceted and innovative collection. Ranging from religious themes in cowboy fiction to Madonna's "Like a Prayer," from televangelism to the world of sports, the book's contributors offer fascinating insights into what popular culture reveals about the nature of American religion today.



Bruce David Forbes provides an introductory essay that states the book's organizing principles. The first group of essays examines the appearance of explicit religious content or implicit religious themes in popular culture, focusing on such particulars as Christmas television specials and the fiction of Louis L'Amour and Cormac McCarthy. The second group of essays considers ways that popular culture influences traditional religions, especially evangelical Christianity. A third group illustrates how aspects of popular culture develop their own myths, symbol systems, and ritual patterns; included are discussions of Star Trek fandom, women's weight loss rituals, and sports. The fourth group offers examples of ways that religion and popular culture might critique each another: the disguise of vengeance in Pale Rider, rap music's take on African-American Christian theology, and a Christian feminist perspective on the role of gender in cyberspace. Jeffrey H. Mahan's concluding essay looks at the academic and general audiences engaged in discussions of social and cultural reform.

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Índice

The Oriental Monk in American Popular Culture
25
Christmas
44
Popular Religion
77
Seeker Religion
145
Women Weight
180
The Church of Baseball the Fetish of CocaCola
219
Part Four
239
On Interpreting
258
Gender Difference and
276
Establishing a Dialogue about Religion
292
Selected Bibliography
305
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