William James’s category of “first-hand religion” allows us to arrive at the religious from an internal and individual perspective, including in those activities and phenomena usually considered secular. B. B. King’s 1972 performance at Sing Sing Prison, documented by David Hoffman, brings both the prisoner audience and the performers to an “additional dimension” distinct from the hollowness of everyday (prison) life. In addition, the presence of this intense experience on the YouTube platform creates a fluid community of second-order observers, bound not by any overarching belief but by observation of the experience itself. King’s performance is in the genre of blues music, which, in turn, has associations with African religious traditions. While the study of diverse religious traditions helps inform our understanding of the kinds of activities that might constitute the religious, this study takes individual experience as primary rather than as a manifestation of a particular tradition.
威廉·詹姆斯的“第一手宗教”范畴允许我们从内部和个人的角度来看待宗教，包括那些通常被认为是世俗的活动和现象。由大卫·霍夫曼(David Hoffman)记录的b.b. King 1972年在Sing Sing监狱的表演，将囚犯观众和表演者带入了一个不同于日常(监狱)生活空虚的“额外维度”。此外，YouTube平台上这种强烈体验的存在创造了一个流动的二阶观察者社区，不受任何首要信念的约束，而是由对体验本身的观察所约束。金的表演属于蓝调音乐，而这种音乐又与非洲的宗教传统有关。虽然对不同宗教传统的研究有助于我们理解可能构成宗教的各种活动，但这项研究将个人经验作为主要内容，而不是作为特定传统的表现。
{"title":"The King of the Blues: First-Hand Religious Experience at Sing Sing Prison","authors":"Rory O’Neill","doi":"10.3138/jrpc.2022-0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/jrpc.2022-0021","url":null,"abstract":"William James’s category of “first-hand religion” allows us to arrive at the religious from an internal and individual perspective, including in those activities and phenomena usually considered secular. B. B. King’s 1972 performance at Sing Sing Prison, documented by David Hoffman, brings both the prisoner audience and the performers to an “additional dimension” distinct from the hollowness of everyday (prison) life. In addition, the presence of this intense experience on the YouTube platform creates a fluid community of second-order observers, bound not by any overarching belief but by observation of the experience itself. King’s performance is in the genre of blues music, which, in turn, has associations with African religious traditions. While the study of diverse religious traditions helps inform our understanding of the kinds of activities that might constitute the religious, this study takes individual experience as primary rather than as a manifestation of a particular tradition.","PeriodicalId":38290,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Religion and Popular Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47343021","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}
Non-religious affiliation is rising in the United States. Non-religious people are viewed as immoral, which fuels stigmatization. I argue that the television show The Good Place challenges such assumptions by conceptualizing ethics outside a religious framework. Through an analysis of three episodes in the series, I argue that the show demonstrates the importance of having non-selfish motivations when doing good for others and the limits to a self-sacrificial approach to ethics.
{"title":"The Good Place: A Case Study for Conceptualizing Non-Religious Ethics and Morality in the United States","authors":"Hannah N McKillop","doi":"10.3138/jrpc.2022-0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/jrpc.2022-0024","url":null,"abstract":"Non-religious affiliation is rising in the United States. Non-religious people are viewed as immoral, which fuels stigmatization. I argue that the television show The Good Place challenges such assumptions by conceptualizing ethics outside a religious framework. Through an analysis of three episodes in the series, I argue that the show demonstrates the importance of having non-selfish motivations when doing good for others and the limits to a self-sacrificial approach to ethics.","PeriodicalId":38290,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Religion and Popular Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45593306","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}
Many interpretations of fandom communities as religious focus on fandom in relation to the “world religions” and the institutional authority they carry. By way of contrast, the author aims to interpret fandom based on religious practice, primarily the Christian Cult of the Saints as a practice of religious devotion. The perspective of religious practice emphasizes that the communities that form as fandom often exist in tension with more traditional religious networks, similar to saint cults. To demonstrate this parallelism, the author explores community formation around saints and fantasy characters as serious play expressed in books of hours and fanzines.
{"title":"Fandom and the Cult of the Saints as Alternate Religious Networks: Fanzines and Books of Hours","authors":"Nathan E. Fleeson","doi":"10.3138/jrpc.2022-0041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/jrpc.2022-0041","url":null,"abstract":"Many interpretations of fandom communities as religious focus on fandom in relation to the “world religions” and the institutional authority they carry. By way of contrast, the author aims to interpret fandom based on religious practice, primarily the Christian Cult of the Saints as a practice of religious devotion. The perspective of religious practice emphasizes that the communities that form as fandom often exist in tension with more traditional religious networks, similar to saint cults. To demonstrate this parallelism, the author explores community formation around saints and fantasy characters as serious play expressed in books of hours and fanzines.","PeriodicalId":38290,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Religion and Popular Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43024940","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}
This article addresses the music and legacy of Kurt Cobain through Rudolf Otto’s elaboration of the mysterium tremendum: a shuddering experience of awe and overpowering dependence evoked by an encounter with the great unseen powers of the universe. The methodology of this article includes comparative and autoethnographic components; I will draw on my own encounters with the sound of Cobain’s music, the memorial to his life in his hometown as marked by pilgrims from around the world, and the significance of this confluence as expressed by fans. To contextualize my personal experience, I was driven to look deeper into Cobain’s life and death. This is an effort to identify the connection between Cobain’s life, Nirvana’s music, and the spiritual dimensions of our experiences that tie us all together as human beings on the face of the earth. The connection between the implications of Otto (the Prussian thinker who endeavours to conceptualize the “holy”), and the punk rock, anti-star from Aberdeen, Washington, is made using the framework of historian of religion Charles Long’s assertion that “religion” may best be understood as “orientation in the ultimate sense” (Long 1999). We will see how the sound of Cobain’s music resonates across time and space, reflecting elements of Otto’s mysterium tremendum as well as a potential source of orientation for others struggling through their experience as human beings in the world.
{"title":"The Aweful Music of Kurt Cobain: Nirvana and the Mysterium Tremendum","authors":"Octavio Carrasco","doi":"10.3138/jrpc.2022-0038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/jrpc.2022-0038","url":null,"abstract":"This article addresses the music and legacy of Kurt Cobain through Rudolf Otto’s elaboration of the mysterium tremendum: a shuddering experience of awe and overpowering dependence evoked by an encounter with the great unseen powers of the universe. The methodology of this article includes comparative and autoethnographic components; I will draw on my own encounters with the sound of Cobain’s music, the memorial to his life in his hometown as marked by pilgrims from around the world, and the significance of this confluence as expressed by fans. To contextualize my personal experience, I was driven to look deeper into Cobain’s life and death. This is an effort to identify the connection between Cobain’s life, Nirvana’s music, and the spiritual dimensions of our experiences that tie us all together as human beings on the face of the earth. The connection between the implications of Otto (the Prussian thinker who endeavours to conceptualize the “holy”), and the punk rock, anti-star from Aberdeen, Washington, is made using the framework of historian of religion Charles Long’s assertion that “religion” may best be understood as “orientation in the ultimate sense” (Long 1999). We will see how the sound of Cobain’s music resonates across time and space, reflecting elements of Otto’s mysterium tremendum as well as a potential source of orientation for others struggling through their experience as human beings in the world.","PeriodicalId":38290,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Religion and Popular Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45447712","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":"Unruly Souls: The Digital Activism of Muslim and Christian Feminists","authors":"Corrina Laughlin","doi":"10.3138/jrpc.2022-0058","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/jrpc.2022-0058","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38290,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Religion and Popular Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49629938","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}
Through a neoteric methodology (speculative ethnography), we analyze the transmedia worldbuilding of the Mad Max franchise as a form of “Ozploitation.” This post-apocalyptic rural sci-fi series exploits culturally specific fears generated from Australia’s colonial past. Mad Max is a popular imagining of the Australian eschaton and its aftermath, a collective national nightmare where near-future Australia—“Maxtralia”—plummets into the savagery invented by generations of colonialist discourse. “Maximum madness,” the retrogressive technological, religious, and socioeconomic wasteland culture for which the series is known, signifies a Western reproach to indigeneity and locative culture, perpetuating attitudes of voyeuristic excitement towards primitivism.
{"title":"“What If We Were Savage?” <i>Mad Max</i> Transmedia as Speculative Anthropology","authors":"William S. Chavez, Shyam Sriram","doi":"10.3138/jrpc.2020-0063","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/jrpc.2020-0063","url":null,"abstract":"Through a neoteric methodology (speculative ethnography), we analyze the transmedia worldbuilding of the Mad Max franchise as a form of “Ozploitation.” This post-apocalyptic rural sci-fi series exploits culturally specific fears generated from Australia’s colonial past. Mad Max is a popular imagining of the Australian eschaton and its aftermath, a collective national nightmare where near-future Australia—“Maxtralia”—plummets into the savagery invented by generations of colonialist discourse. “Maximum madness,” the retrogressive technological, religious, and socioeconomic wasteland culture for which the series is known, signifies a Western reproach to indigeneity and locative culture, perpetuating attitudes of voyeuristic excitement towards primitivism.","PeriodicalId":38290,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Religion and Popular Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136186795","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}
This article studies evangelical horror fiction, such as the Left Behind series, Chick tracts, and the Hell House, which have been relatively popular in American evangelical communities. Despite being labeled as fiction, these horror stories have traditionally been consumed as reality and/or prophecy. Many have relied on Christian nationalist ideas, such as anti-gay and anti-abortion rhetoric, in their stories. While the relationship between evangelical horror and the Christian Right has impacted its evangelical consumers both theologically and politically, its transcendence into non-evangelical popular culture is less researched. This paper looks at how evangelical horror tropes, most of which are inspired by Christian nationalist ideology, have been appropriated by non-evangelical fiction. Analysis of The Conjuring and its sequel will reveal the adoption of many tropes often found in evangelical horror and the Christian Right.
{"title":"Possession, Politics, and Patriotism: The Influence of Christian Nationalism and Evangelical Horror Tropes on The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2","authors":"Zachary Doiron","doi":"10.3138/jrpc.2021-0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/jrpc.2021-0004","url":null,"abstract":"This article studies evangelical horror fiction, such as the Left Behind series, Chick tracts, and the Hell House, which have been relatively popular in American evangelical communities. Despite being labeled as fiction, these horror stories have traditionally been consumed as reality and/or prophecy. Many have relied on Christian nationalist ideas, such as anti-gay and anti-abortion rhetoric, in their stories. While the relationship between evangelical horror and the Christian Right has impacted its evangelical consumers both theologically and politically, its transcendence into non-evangelical popular culture is less researched. This paper looks at how evangelical horror tropes, most of which are inspired by Christian nationalist ideology, have been appropriated by non-evangelical fiction. Analysis of The Conjuring and its sequel will reveal the adoption of many tropes often found in evangelical horror and the Christian Right.","PeriodicalId":38290,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Religion and Popular Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46381783","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}
This article presents an account of prosperity gospel preacher Kenneth Copeland’s unwavering support for Donald Trump. Employing an approach to discourse derived from Ernesto Laclau and Chantelle Mouffe, I examine two aspects of Copeland’s teachings and practices. First, examine his infamous judgement upon Covid-19 (The Judgement), in which he declares war on the virus as a satanic plot. Second, I consider his spiralling teachings on faith, which, like The Judgement, pay considerable attention to the figure of Satan. Both of these aspects reveal Satan’s central role in establishing the stability of Copeland’s discursive world. Satan functions, in Laclau’s terms, as an empty signifier. I call this empty signifier the master signifier, a play on the master Satan. I claim that to understand Copeland’s commitment to Trump, Trump’s relationship to the master signifier is crucial. Copeland casts Trump as an anointed king, a central player in the cosmic battle to realise America’s divine destiny. To be a member of the prosperity gospel community, despite its twists and turns, is to be committed to standing with the anointed against the external foe, Satan.
{"title":"A Satanic Master Signifier: The Prosperity Preacher, the President, and the Disobedient Virus","authors":"Brett Nicholls","doi":"10.3138/jrpc.2021-0057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/jrpc.2021-0057","url":null,"abstract":"This article presents an account of prosperity gospel preacher Kenneth Copeland’s unwavering support for Donald Trump. Employing an approach to discourse derived from Ernesto Laclau and Chantelle Mouffe, I examine two aspects of Copeland’s teachings and practices. First, examine his infamous judgement upon Covid-19 (The Judgement), in which he declares war on the virus as a satanic plot. Second, I consider his spiralling teachings on faith, which, like The Judgement, pay considerable attention to the figure of Satan. Both of these aspects reveal Satan’s central role in establishing the stability of Copeland’s discursive world. Satan functions, in Laclau’s terms, as an empty signifier. I call this empty signifier the master signifier, a play on the master Satan. I claim that to understand Copeland’s commitment to Trump, Trump’s relationship to the master signifier is crucial. Copeland casts Trump as an anointed king, a central player in the cosmic battle to realise America’s divine destiny. To be a member of the prosperity gospel community, despite its twists and turns, is to be committed to standing with the anointed against the external foe, Satan.","PeriodicalId":38290,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Religion and Popular Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44727299","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}
Mehta, Samira K. Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina press, 2018. 260 pp. $27.95US (paper). ISBN 9781469636368.
{"title":"Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States","authors":"D. Levy","doi":"10.3138/jrpc.2022-0053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/jrpc.2022-0053","url":null,"abstract":"Mehta, Samira K. Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina press, 2018. 260 pp. $27.95US (paper). ISBN 9781469636368.","PeriodicalId":38290,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Religion and Popular Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48715616","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}
Sherlock Holmes is often oversimplified as a secular modern professional, with a remorselessly scientific outlook. This hypothesis overlooks late-nineteenth-century English society’s pursuit of new social possibilities for spiritualism, following challenges from Darwinist biological determinism to orthodox biblical mythology and morality. If we see Holmes in a default empirical scientism affiliated to imperial ideologies, we will remain blind to the effects of multiple countercultural and spiritual tones that also underpin the “science of deduction.” Holmes’ methods were subliminally informed by theosophy, as Doyle gleaned much of his spiritual knowledge from first- or second-hand readings on Blavatsky. Thus, Vedantic and Buddhist philosophy find inadvertent—but not coincidental—traces in Holmes through theosophy. An intellectual offspring of the trinity of Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall, Holmes was also a child of Blavatsky’s occult philosophy. Adopting a decolonial praxis, this paper argues that comparisons between the materialistic principles of Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall, on the one hand, and Holmes on the other, are as useful as comparing the detective’s work to Blavatsky’s theosophy.
{"title":"Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of Theosophy: Spiritual Underpinnings of the Science of Deduction","authors":"A. Chatterjee","doi":"10.3138/jrpc.2021-0049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3138/jrpc.2021-0049","url":null,"abstract":"Sherlock Holmes is often oversimplified as a secular modern professional, with a remorselessly scientific outlook. This hypothesis overlooks late-nineteenth-century English society’s pursuit of new social possibilities for spiritualism, following challenges from Darwinist biological determinism to orthodox biblical mythology and morality. If we see Holmes in a default empirical scientism affiliated to imperial ideologies, we will remain blind to the effects of multiple countercultural and spiritual tones that also underpin the “science of deduction.” Holmes’ methods were subliminally informed by theosophy, as Doyle gleaned much of his spiritual knowledge from first- or second-hand readings on Blavatsky. Thus, Vedantic and Buddhist philosophy find inadvertent—but not coincidental—traces in Holmes through theosophy. An intellectual offspring of the trinity of Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall, Holmes was also a child of Blavatsky’s occult philosophy. Adopting a decolonial praxis, this paper argues that comparisons between the materialistic principles of Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall, on the one hand, and Holmes on the other, are as useful as comparing the detective’s work to Blavatsky’s theosophy.","PeriodicalId":38290,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Religion and Popular Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49600365","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}
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