The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture最新文献

{"title":"Taking off the Gloves: Dawkins and the Root of All Evil?","authors":"Curtis D. Carbonell","doi":"10.3138/jrpc.19.1.005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/jrpc.19.1.005","url":null,"abstract":"Richard Dawkins holds Oxford’s Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science. In his move from ethologist to evolutionary theorist, he has entered the public sphere as a vocal opponent of irrationalism. With his Channel Four (UK) television documentary The Root of All Evil? and his accompanying book The God Delusion he pulls no punches in lambasting people of faith as not only dippy thinkers but also as abusers of children’s trusting minds. This article sees Dawkins’s overt rhetoric designed to achieve a cultural goal: to reinvigorate aspects of the Enlightenment Project he finds worthwhile—in particular, a secularism founded on reason highly suspicious of religious meta-narratives. The article asks if his heavy-handed approach is the most viable in winning the religious/secular culture war and suggests that the more centrist position of the historian and philosopher of science, Michael Ruse, might be more productive, if less provocative.","PeriodicalId":219603,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture","volume":"99 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115005940","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Anointing of the Airwaves: Charismatic Televangelism’s Impact on the Church and Community in urban India","authors":"J. James","doi":"10.3138/JRPC.18.1.001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/JRPC.18.1.001","url":null,"abstract":"The Indian Government’s open policy on satellite television is attracting a plethora of American-based charismatic television ministries in India. This study, albeit based on preliminary findings from a limited study of church and Hindu community leaders, shows that Charismatic pastors are more positive about Charismatic televangelism than non-Charismatic pastors. Both groups, however, have strong reservations on issues like fundraising, dress code and western dancing. The high-caste Hindus revealed during the research that they were resistant to any form of Christian evangelism including televangelism. Besides caste, class, language and gender, televangelism faces cultural barriers in reaching Indians. The prosperity, success and healing doctrines of Charismatic teaching seem to appeal to Hindus from the middle to lower level economic classes. Concerns have been expressed, however, by Christian leaders that these Hindus who are attracted to Charismatic televangelism may be espousing a form of Christianit...","PeriodicalId":219603,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127731930","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Big Fish: Understanding Historical Narrative","authors":"B. Wilson","doi":"10.3138/JRPC.18.1.002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/JRPC.18.1.002","url":null,"abstract":"Big Fish raises the hermeneutic question how narrative truth relates to factual truth—how “what is said happened” relates to “what really happened.” Will wants to know facts about his father’s life. His father, Edward, is dying but he never accedes to his son’s request for a factual autobiography, preferring to tell stories about the significant moments in his life and the people he encountered. Narrative truth is what Edward values, for it opens up the dimension of significance— “what an event means to the narrator.” The meaning of events narrated is dramatized in this film. Big Fish is a story about redemption and transformation. Everyone whom Edward encounters is redeemed or changed in a positive manner. Even his son, Will, is changed. Over time, he comes to see the value of story and vows to portray his father’s life the way he wanted it told. Big Fish poses hermeneutic problems on two levels. On the individual level, the conflict between narrative and factual truth arises when individuals seek to aut...","PeriodicalId":219603,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture","volume":"70 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132891461","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Prevalence of Witches: Witchcraft and Popular Culture in the Making of a Yoruba Town","authors":"W. Rea","doi":"10.3138/JRPC.18.1.005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/JRPC.18.1.005","url":null,"abstract":"This paper considers two instances of witchcraft representation. The first is a representation that develops from the author’s fieldwork and his own experience of witnessing a witchcraft trail. The second is in Nigerian graphic comics that were popular in the 1990s and which to an extent influenced the current form of popular Nigerian soap opera and video films. This paper contrasts attitudes toward witchcraft in the Ekiti Yoruba town of Ikole outlining the multiplicity of moral attitudes toward witchcraft among the various constituents of the town, and the way that these generate local understandings of the town’s identity.","PeriodicalId":219603,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131728586","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Serpents, Sainthood, and Celebrity: Symbolic and Ritual Tension in Appalachian Pentecostal Snake Handling","authors":"K. Tidball, C. Toumey","doi":"10.3138/JRPC.17.1.005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/JRPC.17.1.005","url":null,"abstract":"Intense media coverage of Appalachian Pentecostal‐Holiness serpent handling sometimes causes a switch in signifier/signified relationships. The snakes used symbolically in this practice are grounded less in traditional religious meaning, and more in a certain recent secular meaning: from signifying faith in the Holy Spirit to indicating the value of celebrity status. This phenomenon is analyzed in a framework of theories about symbols and rituals, and is then described in a series of ethnographic observations at a serpent‐handling church in Kentucky. This case study raises some troubling issues about how cosmopolitan media represent a distinctive local culture. [1] Why do some Pentecostal Christians handle serpents in their religious services? This practice, so firmly associated with low‐income white Protestants in the Appalachian mountains, has received a great deal of scholarly attention, which in turn has generated a series of explanations. Here we summarize three, and explore them at length in a subsequent section. Mark 16:17‐18 (KJV) teaches that “these signs shall follow them that believe; in my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” And so according to one explanation, that reference, in and of itself, accounts for this practice, in the sense that serpent handling is an act of faith defined by a biblical text. [2] A second theory suggests that serpent‐handling symbolizes socio‐economic issues which transcend Biblical belief. The serpent represents the Devil—a common Christian image—but the Devil is equivalent to evil forms of capitalism which have stolen natural resources and destroyed communities in Appalachia. In this view, the religious features of serpent handling are part of a larger whole. [3] A third account of serpent‐handling in Appalachia develops the idea that serpent handlers are oppressed and exploited by outsiders, but it adds an intriguing interpretation to that observation. It tells us that the larger American society has taken almost everything of value from the people of Appalachia, and has confined them to such negative social categories as \"hillbillies,\" \"holy rollers,\" and \"poor white","PeriodicalId":219603,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133126822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Morality and Politics of Consumer Religion: How Consumer Religion Fuels the Culture Wars in the United States","authors":"Scott T. Kline","doi":"10.3138/JRPC.17.1.002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/JRPC.17.1.002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: In his book Consuming Religion (2003) Vincent J. Miller demonstrates how consumer capitalism has been able to commodify religious rituals, symbols, and figures and market them to consumers seeking self-improvement, individual enlightenment, and/or greater spirituality. His thesis is that “consumer religion” is emblematic of a radically transformed social relationship created by consumer capitalism. This article focuses on an element of consumer religion missing in Miller’s argument; that is, how commodified, consumer religion enables certain conservative political leaders to claim a tradition as their inheritance and, in turn, mobilize alienated consumers/voters in the US culture wars. In practical-political terms, culture-war conservatives have found a way to consolidate political power by embracing both a free market, which actually erodes local tradition, and traditional values, which provides fuel for culture war battles over popular movies, television, music, and public education.","PeriodicalId":219603,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture","volume":"116 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124255477","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Norman Jewison and Melvyn Bragg’s Jesus in 1973 and Mark’s Gospel","authors":"Jayhoon Yang","doi":"10.3138/JRPC.17.1.003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/JRPC.17.1.003","url":null,"abstract":"Interpreting Norman Jewison and Melvyn Bragg’s film Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) as a passion narrative, I examined it by employing the four dimensions of the cinematic quest for Jesus movies that Barns Tatum suggested. This film parallels Mark’s Gospel. It adopts significant Markan motifs and themes such as “way (hodos),” “blindness of the disciples,” “servanthood” and “thinking the things of God.” It also employs Markan structure in the opening and the closing of the movie, and portrays Jesus, as well as other characters, as Mark does.","PeriodicalId":219603,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129786767","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Enchanted Modernism: “Magical Thinking: a Symposium,” University of London, May 11-12, 2007","authors":"S. McCorristine","doi":"10.3138/JRPC.17.1.006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/JRPC.17.1.006","url":null,"abstract":"“I see dead people … They don’t know they’re dead!” So run the famous lines from M. Night Shyamalan’s film The Sixth Sense (1999). These fearful words, addressed by a clairvoyant boy to the child psychologist examining his “hallucinations,” herald a now-famous twist towards the end of the film in which the psychologist is himself revealed to be dead, a revenant in fact, although he did not know it. For researchers and commentators in a wide variety of disciplines and cultural arenas it has become known that the great “twist” in life, as in death, is that between knowledge and belief, between evidence and faith, there exists a chasm within which deeply-rooted human behaviours, such as ghost-seeing, percolate and can come to dominate our experience of the world. The foreknowledge of our own personal death, and its consequent denial and obfuscation in everyday thought-processes has become a standard reference-point in debates focusing upon the concept of magical thinking. This concept, equally at home in the...","PeriodicalId":219603,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture","volume":"69 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128204473","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Everyday is [Not] Like Sunday","authors":"Zachary R. Smith","doi":"10.3138/JRPC.17.1.004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/JRPC.17.1.004","url":null,"abstract":"The secular experience of Sunday in the rhetoric of rock ’n’ roll (sex, drugs and subversion) proves Eliade’s formulation of the profane readily encapsulates with the term’s popular understanding. As David Chidester articulates, rock ’n’ roll is often viewed as “the antithesis of religion, not merely an offensive art form, but a blasphemous, sacrilegious, and antireligious force in society.” In the same way that Christianity sought to differentiate itself from Judaism, so too does rock ’n’ roll seek to make ground from the traditional terms and Puritanical values with which Christianity regularly deals. As in most attempts at differentiation, the differentiator can never escape those fundamental commonalities it shares with the differentiated. Judaism and Christianity, for instance, differ most dramatically in practice and belief, but share a similar discourse. Despite the concerted efforts of some to categorically separate the two into diametric oppositions, Christianity and rock ’n’ roll share certain f...","PeriodicalId":219603,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture","volume":"144 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133263865","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Malcolm X and British-Muslims: A Personal Reflection","authors":"A. Saeed","doi":"10.3138/JRPC.16.1.004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/JRPC.16.1.004","url":null,"abstract":"Just as the Civil Rights and Black consciousness movements have inspired human rights activists around the world, Malcolm X has been a motivating figure for such people (Marqusee 1999). Malcolm X’s appeal and recognition have transcended the boundaries of “race” and national borders.","PeriodicalId":219603,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125789834","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}