The Bible and Popular Culture in America. Edited by Allene Stuart Phy. SBL The Bible in American Culture, 2. Philadelphia: Fortress; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984. xiii + 248 pages. $15.95. - The Bible and American Arts and Letters. Edited by Giles Gunn. SBL The Bible in American Culture Series, 3. Philadelphia: Fortress; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983. x + 244 pages. $15.95.

Horizons ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 199-200
Author(s):  
Gerald A. Largo
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The Bible

Teaching the Bible and Popular Media as Part of Contemporary Rape Culture

2020 ◽  
pp. 423-439
Author(s):  
Beatrice J. W. Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Rape Culture ◽  
Pedagogical Strategies ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Cultural Myths ◽  
Biblical Texts

This essay explores pedagogical strategies for addressing rape culture in biblical studies courses, employing Genesis 34 and Judges 19–21 as primary texts. The first section discusses the nature of popular culture and its impact on gender. The following four sections highlight cultural myths about sexual assault by focusing on significant biblical texts and incorporating aspects of popular media to facilitate conversations about rape culture. The conclusion summarizes the main points and encourage further studies that combine the study of popular media and biblical texts. Overall, the essay contributes to the reading and teaching of the Bible within contemporary rape culture so that students become critical interpreters of biblical texts, as they become resistant readers of past and present rape culture.

How American Newspaper Comic Strips Portray God, Angels, and Humans

2020 ◽  
pp. 398-413
Author(s):  
Leonard Greenspoon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Online Media ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Comic Strips ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Texts

The comic strip as a mainstay of print and more recently online media is an American invention that began its development in the last decades of the 1800s. For many decades in the mid-twentieth century, comic strips were among the most widely disseminated forms of popular culture. With their succession of panels, pictures, and pithy perspectives, comics have come to cover an array of topics, including religion. This chapter looks at how the Bible (Old and New Testament) figures in comic strips, focusing specifically on three areas: the depiction of the divine, renderings of specific biblical texts, and how comic strips can function as sites in which religious identity and controversies play out. Relevant examples are drawn from several dozen strips. Special attention is also paid to a few, like Peanuts and BC, in which biblical imagery, ideology, and idiom are characteristically portrayed in distinctive ways.

Moses and Popular Culture

2020 ◽  
pp. 30-45
Author(s):  
Linda S. Schearing
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Video Games ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Cultural Artifact ◽  
Religious Meaning

The story of Moses occurs in a plethora of popular culture mediums (fiction, songs, films, television, video games, comics, digital internet sources, etc.). This essay examines three themes in which Moses as a cultural artifact plays a crucial role in contemporary popular culture: visualizing Moses (Moses in film), learning from Moses (Moses as metaphor or analogy), and laughing at or with Moses (Moses in humor). Such a survey shows graphically the elasticity of Moses as a multivalent cultural artifact that has both influenced and continues to influence American culture. Indeed, while some extract religious meaning from the Moses story, others see parallels between Moses’ struggles and their own.

Publishing in Bible and American Popular Culture

2020 ◽  
pp. 536-552
Author(s):  
Robert Paul Seesengood
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Academic Publishing ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Future Work

This essay is an examination of scholarship on the Bible and (American) popular culture. It reviews the history and assumptions of cultural studies and maps how this body of work influenced biblical scholarship after 1990. It surveys an array of examples of scholarship on the Bible and popular culture and concludes with some suggestions for future work. Specifically, this essay asks the following: How has interest in Bible and popular culture affected academic publishing? How did these trends emerge, and what assumptions prompt them? What new journals or series or reference works have appeared that are specifically devoted to this broad topic, and what are some ways that the Bible and popular culture have been treated therein?

"They're Freaks!": The Cult Stereotype in Fictional Television Shows, 1958––2008

2011 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 81-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn S. Neal
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Culture Form ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
Present Context

This article analyzes the stereotypical portrayal of cults on fictional television shows and demonstrates the vital role that this popular culture form plays in the dissemination of anticult ideology. Through an in-depth examination of five episodes that aired between 1998 and 2008, it delineates how these shows employed stereotypical cult elements, such as fraud and violence, as well as contrasts in clothing, setting, and lifestyle to differentiate conventional religion from the dangers and delusions of cults. Further, the article reveals how usage of the cult concept is not limited to the present context and documents the historical pervasiveness of the cult stereotype on television since 1958. By highlighting these patterns, this study shows the power and implications of the cult stereotype. It illuminates how these television shows constitute a powerful force in defining and policing the boundaries of religious legitimacy in American culture.

Burke O. Long. Imagining the Holy Land: Maps, Models, and Fantasy Travels. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. xi, 258 pp.

AJS Review ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 395-398
Author(s):  
Rehav Rubin
Keyword(s):  
American Culture ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Indiana University ◽  
New Towns ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Good Book ◽  
Special Place ◽  
Land Of Israel

Many of the pioneers and settlers who came to America held the Bible in their right hands and were strongly inspired by this “Good Book.” They believed they had come to the “New Promised Land,” and consequently gave Biblical names to the new towns and villages, as well as to their children. It was, therefore, almost natural that the remote land in the east, known as the Holy Land, Palestine, the Promised Land, or The Land of Israel, had, and probably still has, a very special place in American culture and society.

Touching

Religion ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 179-194
Author(s):  
David Chidester
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Western Thought ◽  
Alien Abduction ◽  
Sense Of Touch

This chapter undertakes a tactile exploration of the sense of touch in modern American culture and religion. After briefly recalling the denigration of tactility in Western thought, the discussion considers the usefulness of the work of two theorists, Emmanuel Levinas and Walter Benjamin, in recovering the sense of touch—the intimate caress, the violent shock—as deep background for tracking basic modes of religious tactility. By paying attention to sensory media and metaphors, the chapter proceeds from cutaneous binding and burning to kinaesthetic moving and to haptic handling in order to enter this field of tactile meaning and power. Specific cases of tactility are quickly considered, including binding covenants, firewalking, flag burning, alien abduction, global capitalism, and cellular microbiology. By exploring the religious dynamics of the sense of touch, this chapter points to the presence of a tactile politics of perception circulating through religion and popular culture.

The Uses of the Bible

The Bible ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Coogan
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Influence ◽  
Reception History ◽  
The Bible

What is reception history? Reception history is a scholarly term for what we could call the study of the afterlives of the Bible: how, since it was being formed, the Bible has been used, from popular culture to high art. Such cultural influence of canonical...

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