This specialization permits in-depth investigation of the ways religion and popular culture interact to shape attitudes and social norms, behaviors, and theologies. Faculty research on popular culture examines the ways in which the arts, including fiction, film, music, online games, and social media impacts beliefs, lifestyles, behaviors, and socio-ecological systems.
Avenues of study engage the ways in which minority traditions are presented to an American audience, and the power of popular culture to normalize and mainstream religious traditions that had once seemed alien or un-American; the role of religious outsiders in the US in creating significant popular culture is a focus, as well as the interaction between different types of culture (highbrow versus middlebrow, for instance) and social class and religion in America. In addition, this area of focus pays attention to how motion pictures and music, novels, and poetry, express and promote perceptions, values, and behaviors, including notions of sacrality and desecrations, toward environmental entities and systems. We also ask how portrayal of the paranormal and supernatural in film and fiction may shape opinion of what is considered scientific knowledge and what counts as religion.
Faculty working in the areas of popular culture collaborate with faculty across the campus in the fields of ecology, Jewish studies, and anthropology.
Faculty
Rachel Gordan
Bron Taylor
Erin Prophet