Religion
Related: About this forumThe Rise of Pop Culture in Religious Studies
A. David Lewis | Oct 28, 2013
If academic conferences and scholarly panels give a glimpse of books to come, then the program for the 2013 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion signals the continuing rise of popular culture as a topic in religious studies. The AAR conference, in conjunction with the Society of Biblical Literatures (SBL) own yearly event, will take over the Baltimore Convention Center just before Thanksgiving, November 23-26. Many of the religion scholars and practitioners of nearly every religion in attendance this year will be speaking the same language--the vernacular of popular culture.
The AAR wont ever be confused with the Popular Culture Associationthe next conference of that nationwide, scholarly association focused on American culture is not until April 2014but television, film, music, and comic books are not far from the minds of AAR members these days. The Theopoetics group, devoted to the critical study of faith intertwining with peoples experience of art, aims to examine Scandal, ABCs popular political thriller; the Contemporary Pagan Studies group, known for its focus on the natural world, enters dark movie theaters to look at the film version of the YA novel Beautiful Creatures (Little, Brown, 2009). Perusing the AAR program book, attendees will note a number of pop-centered panels and discussions dotting the long weekend, some in overlapping time slots. See Critical Approaches to Hip-Hop and Religion or go to Religion and Science Fiction? If conference-goers choose Hip-Hop, they can catch discussions of Battlestar Galactica or Lost on the SBL roster too.
Publishers who will be promoting and selling their books in the AAR/SBL Exhibit Hall have taken note. The staid and formal Bible commentaries and other scholarly books are still there, but now theyre just one shelf away from Appletopia: Media Technology and the Religious Imagination of Steve Jobs (Baylor, Aug.) by Brett Robinson or Popcultured: Thinking Christianly about Style, Media and Entertainment by Steve Turner (InterVarsity Press, June). Presses like Bloomsbury look at religious themes graphic novels--Graven Images (2010); Do the Gods Wear Capes? (2011)alongside titles like Pop Cult: Religion and Popular Music (2010) and The Sacred and Cinema (2012). In just the past twelve months, Routledge has been stocking its list with works such as Understanding Religion and Popular Culture (2012), Digital Religion (2012), and Bible and Cinema (Oct.).
The AARs attention to popular culture crosses all sorts of borders, from the international to the cyber-spatial. The Religion in South Asia section and the Religion, Film, and Visual Culture group are combining forces for a four-part panel on Bollywood and religion. Religion, Film, and Visual Culture is also teaming with the AARs official Religion and Popular Culture group for an analysis of the Coen Brothers works as moral critiques of American spiritual and ethical values, according to the panel description. The Religion, Media, and Culture group will dedicate a full session to Reflections on Playing with Religion in Digital Gaming, a flexible, fertile sub-field that has already spawned books such as eGods: Faith versus Fantasy in Computer Gaming by Williams Sims Bainbridge (Oxford University Press, Mar.), Of Games and God: A Christian Exploration of Video Games by Kevin Schut (Brazos Press, Jan.), and the upcoming Playing with Religion in Digital Games from Heidi A. Campbell and Gregory P. Grieve (Indiana University Press, 2014).
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/religion/article/59730-the-rise-of-pop-culture-in-religious-studies.html
dimbear
(6,271 posts)Trek, LOTR, or "The Force."
Not sure that that's a basis for the ages.
rug
(82,333 posts)dimbear
(6,271 posts)displace that classic in theological discussions.