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?

Introduction

Black Samson ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Nyasha Junior ◽  
Jeremy Schipper
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African Descent ◽  
American Art ◽  
Biblical Story ◽  
Court Records ◽  
White American ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Popular Subject

Samson is a popular subject in biblical scholarship on the use of the Bible in art, literature, and popular culture, although this scholarship tends to focus on Samson in White European and White American art and literature. The introduction explains how Samson becomes identified with people of African descent in American literature. It discusses the biblical story of Samson and the lack of physical descriptions of Samson in the Bible. It provides examples of the racialized uses of Samson in poetry, sermons, speeches, narratives by enslaved persons, court records, and newspapers. It offers some possible reasons why the biblical story of Samson may have become associated with African Americans.

Television and the Bible in American Popular Culture

2020 ◽  
pp. 308-329
Author(s):  
Matthew A. Collins
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
First Century ◽  
Television Programs ◽  
Biblical Literacy ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
American Television ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Impact

This essay examines the Bible in American television, focusing in particular on the twenty-first century. It suggests that there are three broad categories which may helpfully illustrate and encompass the diverse ways in which the Bible appears and/or is utilized: (1) educating about the Bible (e.g., documentaries); (2) dramatizing the Bible (renditions of biblical stories); and (3) drawing on the Bible (the impact or use of the Bible in other television programs). Examining each of these in turn, this essay highlights the prevalence of the Bible on television and thus in American popular culture more generally, as well as considering some of the myriad ways in which it has been read, used, and interpreted. In particular, it endeavors to show how the medium can function as a tool for both reflecting and promoting levels of biblical literacy among its audience.

Improvising on the Canon through Jazz Music and Biblical Interpretation in American Popular Culture

2020 ◽  
pp. 343-361
Author(s):  
Andrew Moss
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Theological Interpretation ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Sun Ra ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
John Coltrane ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Jazz Music ◽  
Duke Ellington

The chapter explores the resonances of jazz music, artistry and artists with biblical allusion and interpretation. It outlines the role that jazz played in American popular culture with reference to African American culture and the development of jazz from the American spirituals tradition. It examines representations of the Bible in jazz works by Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Mahalia Jackson, and Ed Summerlin, including exploring the genre of “sacred jazz.” It moves from an exegetical analysis of jazz works in relation to the biblical text to a broader theological interpretation of biblical themes in improvisation. Drawing on Philip Bohlman’s analysis of music cultures, it articulates how improvisation shapes the cultural and religious identity of jazz music. Using the examples of John Coltrane and Sun Ra it argues that contemporary discussions of human freedom, liberation, and constraint are resourceful methodological tools for current biblical interpretations of jazz music.

Barbara Johnson

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keja Valens
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
American Studies ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Theoretical Project

Barbara Johnson (b. 1947–d. 2009) bridged the heyday of deconstruction and the turn to theory in the 1970s and the ascendance of cultural studies and the turn to ethics in the early 21st century. As Johnson moved the insights of deconstruction into areas such as feminisms, African-American studies, and cultural studies, her attention to “differences within” engaged not only language and rhetoric but also politics, popular culture, and the power of differentiation to both oppress and express particular subjects. Johnson’s career, cut short by a neurodegenerative disease, is framed by her work in translation of Derrida’s Dissemination at the beginning of her career and Mallarmé’s Divagations toward its end. She cast her critical and theoretical project as the translation of structuralism and poststructuralism into literary insight, a process that is easily recognizable in her most anthologized, reprinted, and oft-cited essays, “The Frame of Reference,” “Melville’s Fist,” “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” and “Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Johnson’s work transports critical frames and moves across a variety of genres and fields, from psychoanalysis to law and from Romanticism to 20th-century American popular culture. Her unparalleled readings—of words, concepts, stories, poems—examine how texts do, and undo, what they say. In the process, Johnson’s writing playfully and often surprisingly displaces authority (even her own) to reveal the poetic and political work of multivalence. The wide range of anthologies that include essays by Johnson attest to the tremendous scope of her work and to the difficulty of summarizing even where its major contributions lie.

The Oxford Handbook of the Bible and American Popular Culture

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Online Publication ◽  
Review Process ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
Print Publication ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Pass Through

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online. For more information, please read the site FAQs.

The Bible

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Coogan
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Biblical Authority ◽  
Western History ◽  
Saturday Night ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Saturday Night Live ◽  
Influential Book

The Bible is the most influential book in Western history. As the foundational text of Judaism and Christianity, the Bible has been interpreted and reinterpreted over millennia, utilized to promote a seemingly endless run of theological and political positions. Adherents and detractors alike point to different passages throughout to justify wildly disparate behaviors and beliefs. Translated and retranslated, these texts lead both to unity and intense conflict. Influential books on any topic are typically called “bibles.” What is the Bible? As a text considered sacred by some, its stories and language appear throughout the fine arts and popular culture, from Shakespeare to Saturday Night Live. In Michael Coogan’s eagerly awaited addition to Oxford’s What Everyone Needs to know® series, conflicts and controversies surrounding the world’s bestselling book are addressed in a straightforward Q&A format. This book provides an unbiased look at biblical authority and authorship, the Bible’s influence in Western culture, the disputes over meaning and interpretation, and the state of biblical scholarship today. Brimming with information for the student and the expert alike, The Bible: What Everyone Needs to Know ® is a dependable introduction to a most contentious holy book.

Teaching Bible and American Popular Culture

2020 ◽  
pp. 520-536
Author(s):  
Jane S. Webster
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Transformative Learning ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Course Design ◽  
Biblical Literacy ◽  
Spiritual Quest ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Relationship

Educators often need help to design courses that lead to transformative learning. This paper outlines a practical approach to course design drawing on the scholarship of teaching and learning, the Association of American Colleges & Universities, and current work in the field. Starting with relevant and urgent student learning outcomes (such as biblical literacy and spiritual quest), effective courses build a series of learning opportunities that enable students to discover content, construct meaning, and create something new. By engaging in the Bible with, in, and alongside of popular culture, students learn more about the Bible, culture, and the relationship between the two. The context of a meta-question requires them to reflect on such essential human concerns as the nature of authority, the construction of identity, and the contextualization of truth. In this way, learning becomes transformative.

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