Jenna Weissman Joselit No other country made, or continues to make, as much of them as America does.
Tag Archives: secular
Remembering Prince
Mark Hulsether If music or group religious rituals can change the world—and I think at times they can—then the world changed during this performance.
The Changing Nature of Sacred Spaces
Wendy Cadge Flexibility is evident in many health care organizations where religious symbols have increasingly been removed from traditional chapels and furniture put on wheels to be as versatile as possible.
Rock ‘n’ Roll Lazarus
Jill Marshall In the Gospel and Bowie’s interpretation of it, the act of coming back from the dead is dramatic and controversial.
The Ruling Class: Jeff Tweedy Singing about Jesus
Jeff Tweedy Yeah he’s back jack, smokin’ crack, find him if you wanna get found…
Jim James’ Musical Blend of the Religious, Spiritual, and Secular
Scott Muir My aim here is not to fix any “real meaning” to James’ output or speculate about his personal identity, but rather to illustrate how he presents an entangled web of meanings that his listeners may appropriate for their own religious/spiritual/secular constructions of the sacred.
Seven Questions for Erin A. Smith: What Would Jesus Read?
Erin A. Smith I purposely excluded sacred scriptures from the study, because I wanted to investigate the messy relay between the commercial and the transcendent.
The Wisdom of Umberto Eco
Ed Simon If the loss of Eco is both a loss of a genuine public intellectual who saw no shame in celebrating complexities, then it is also the loss of a scholar who transcended the boring culture war debates that bifurcate all experience into the religious and the secular. He understood the undeniably sacred nature of the written word, where all interpretation must in some sense be exegetical.
Religion Around Michael Bolton: A Modest Proposal
Mark Hulsether To the Editors of the Religion Around Series: It has come to my attention that your press has initiated a series of short books about how religious or quasi-religious themes relate “around” creative artists. But it seems that, in practice, most such “prominence” could be translated into an idiom of highbrow tastemakers valorizing artists who enjoy universal acclaim—or even a language of reproducing elite hegemonic cultural capital. Herewith, I submit a modest proposal for a book more attuned to making the series pluralistic and representative of the everyday lived tastes of subaltern listeners: the manifold religious dimensions of Michael Bolton.
Under-the-Radar Religion for Nones: Björk’s ‘Vulnicura’
Mark Hulsether If there is any part of our culture where the (typically noxious) idea of trickle-down influence actually makes sense, Björk is a good place to look. She ranks amid an extremely select handful of musician’s musicians whose creative innovations especially matter. This year her superb record, Vulnicura, flew less under the popular radar than some of her earlier work, since it was coordinated with an exhibit showcasing her fashion innovations at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and features in the New Yorker and New York Times Magazine.