
Contents
Part front matter for Part II Popular Culture in Religion
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Published:March 2017
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Part I of this book looked at the way religion appears in popular culture. This section reverses the relationship between religion and popular culture. It looks at ways in which traditional religious institutions and communities are themselves influenced by popular culture, taking on popular forms and practices, and perhaps changing their substance in the process. While you still see evidence of stories from or about religion, these authors move away from a predominantly literary treatment of religion and popular culture to give greater attention to matters of religious practice. They are interested in how popular culture changes what people do with their bodies. They ask how popular culture influences the way religious people worship, dress, use technology, and think about the self and family.
At the heart of this discussion are questions about how religion, religious beliefs, and practices may change in these interactions with popular culture. How people feel about this possibility depends in large measure on certain attitudes about religion and its relationship to culture more generally. For some people, the suggestion that religion is shaped by culture is troubling. They argue that religion has a substance or essence that is not reducible to other forms of culture such as politics or play. They think of religion as something that connects us to God, gods, or to an experience of the sacred that exists apart from society as a link to an unchangeable realm of the sacred. If we think about religion in this way any cultural adaptation or influence may be seen as a dilution of religion’s purity and power. The history of religions tells us that, whatever the nature of the deities they point to, the human practice of religion changes over time. We reinterpret ancient stories and develop new rituals and practices that respond to our current situation. So, to take but one example, Judaism’s identity was long centered on worship at the temple in Jerusalem. When the Babylonians destroyed the temple about 586 BCE and took the Jews into captivity they lost this religious center. Their anguish is recorded in Psalm 137:4, which asks, “How can we sing the songs of the Lord [that is the songs intended to be sung in the Temple] while in a foreign land?” (NIV). Eventually, the temple at Jerusalem was reestablished, only to be destroyed again by the Romans in the year 70 CE. The loss of the temple and the scattering of Jews around the known world was an existential crisis, and the Torah, the most sacred text of the Jews, became a new center of Jewish religious practices, one that they could carry with them into the diaspora. Understanding Judaism requires thinking about how these cultural and historical changes reshaped Jewish practice and belief.
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