Religion and popular culture is a fast-growing field that spans a variety of disciplines. This volume offers the first real survey of the field to date and provides a guide for the work of future scholars. It explores:
- key issues of definition and of methodology
- religious encounters with popular culture across media, material culture and space, ranging from videogames and social networks to cooking and kitsch, architecture and national monuments
- representations of religious traditions in the media and popular culture, including important non-Western spheres such as Bollywood
This Companion will serve as an enjoyable and informative resource for students and a stimulus to future scholarly work.
Religion and popular culture is a fast-growing field spanning a range of disciplines. This informative resource offers the first real survey of the field to date, considering key methodological issues. The entries explore religious encounters with popular culture across media, material culture and space, ranging from videogames and social networks to cooking and kitsch, architecture and national monuments. The Companion also examines the representation of different religious traditions within the media and popular culture, mainly in the West but also including Bollywood and other important non-Western pop cultural phenomena.
"Overall, this is an impressive collection ofessays that encapsulates many of the important points of interface between religion and popular culture. It will become an important marker in the development of the field and its introduction at this point is timely."
Steve Knowles, University of Chester, UK
"Lyden and Mazur offer a fascinating collection of essays from a wide range of contributors exploring religion and popular culture. This is a terrific resource for the classroom and scholars will be impressed with their contribution to the field."
Gina Messina-Dysert, Claremont Graduate University, USA
This excellent, thoroughly indexed volume provides a much-needed overview of religion and popular culture, a growing area of study that draws upon a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. (...) Scholars will appreciate the breadth of coverage this work offers, and students will enjoy the many contemporary references (e.g., Miley Cyrus, South Park) that illustrate the editors' themes. Summing Up: Recommended. All academic levels; general readers."
S. Rokusek, Florida Gulf Coast University in CHOICE
