The Rise of Pop Culture in Religious Studies
A. David Lewis ("Publishers Weekly," October 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 Literature’s (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 won’t ever be confused with the Popular Culture Association—the
next conference of that nationwide, scholarly association focused on American
culture is not until April 2014—but 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 people’s
experience of art, aims to examine Scandal, ABC’s 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 they’re 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 AAR’s 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 AAR’s “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).
Few say it better, or have watched the rise of the popular in scholarly
religion more closely than Megan Goodwin, Elon University visiting assistant
professor of religious studies. “Popular culture plays a significant role in
shaping public awareness of and opinions about minority religions,” she
says. Goodwin will moderate for the first time a combined Mormon Studies
Group and Religion and Popular Culture Group panel. “Scholarly consideration
of
popular culture is a crucial component of contemporary religious studies,”
she says. “I'm gratified to see popular culture and religion evolving as
an interdisciplinary conversation.”
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