Product Description: This contributed two-volume work tackles a fascinating topic: how and why God plays a central role in the modern world and profoundly influences politics, art, culture, and our moral reflection―even for nonbelievers.• Supplies a broad conception of "God" that provides readers with a fuller and more accurate portrait of a phenomenon that evolved substantially over time but also remains an enduring―and enduringly influential―element of popular culture• Explores not only how individuals grapple with the question of God, but also how God invariably and unintentionally enters people's thinking• Supplies direct examples of the key role that God plays in everyday life that readers will find compelling from both a personal and cultural perspective• Comprises essays from sociologists, theologians, cultural critics, and journalists that present a wide range of perspectives and approaches to this universally relevant topi...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

This book positions the «prophetic» as an organizing concept that can bridge religious and secular criticism of popular media. Drawing from philosophical ethics and moral psychology, the book argues that prophetic critique engages a complex set of universal human capabilities. Whether religious or secular in origin, prophetic critique requires developmentally complex modes of critical reflection, imagination, empathy, and communication. Although this book is diverse in perspective, each author seeks to expose how the content, institutions, and technologies of popular media alternately support – or undermine – the basic values of equality, human dignity, and social justice. By foregrounding such universal principles, the authors distinguish their arguments from critical/cultural scholarship that fails to acknowledge its own normative foundations and implicit theology of culture. The authors demonstrate the efficacy of this framework by applying it to specific case studies in popular media including theater, film, music, journalism, and digital culture. The book argues that the prophetic critique of mass media is essential to maintaining a productive tension between religious communities and the institutions of secular democracy. More broadly, in outlining an inclusive understanding of prophetic critique, this book builds bridges between religious and secular scholarship and generates a unique vision for a revitalized, mass-mediated public sphere.

Product Description: An exploration of secularization in America, this book provides students with an innovative way of understanding the relationship between religion and secular culture. In Secular Steeples, Conrad Ostwalt challenges long-held assumptions about the relationship between religion and culture and about the impact of secularization...read more

Product Description: From The Matrix and Harry Potter to Stargate SG:1 and The X-Files, recent science fiction and fantasy offerings both reflect and produce a sense of the religious. This work examines this pop-culture spirituality, or "postmodern sacred," showing how consumers use the symbols contained in explicitly "unreal" texts to gain a secondhand experience of transcendence and belief...read more

Product Description: This introductory text provides students with a 'toolbox' of approaches for analyzing religion and popular culture. It encourages readers to think critically about the ways in which popular cultural practices and products, especially those considered as forms of entertainment, are laden with religious ideas, themes, and values...read more

Product Description: In this ambitious book on southern gospel music, Douglas Harrison reexamines the music's historical emergence and its function as a modern cultural phenomenon. Rather than a single rhetoric focusing on the afterlife as compensation for worldly sacrifice, Harrison presents southern gospel as a network of interconnected messages that evangelical Christians use to make individual sense of both Protestant theological doctrines and their own lived experiences...read more

Product Description: Are you a Belieber? Justin Bieber’s meteoric rise from a regular kid in small-town Canada to “the most famous teenager on the planet” has captivated the imagination of a generation of young devotees known as “Beliebers.” With record-setting album sales, more than 11 million followers on Twitter and the highest-grossing concert film of all time, the 17-year-old pop star has legions of fans around the globe who hang on his every word...read more

Product Description: In popular culture, the Bible is generally associated with films: The Passion of the Christ, The Ten Commandments, Jesus of Montreal, and many others. Less attention has been given to the relationship between the Bible and other popular media such as hip-hop, reggae, rock, and country and western music; popular and graphic novels; animated television series; and apocalyptic fantasy...read more

Product Description: In popular culture, the Bible is generally associated with films: The Passion of the Christ, The Ten Commandments, Jesus of Montreal, and many others. Less attention has been given to the relationship between the Bible and other popular media such as hip-hop, reggae, rock, and country and western music; popular and graphic novels; animated television series; and apocalyptic fantasy...read more

Product Description: The authors of religious scriptures had little difficulty enhancing sacred narratives with the rhetoric of violence. The phenomenon continues in the habitual linkage of violence and religion in contemporary film, music and literature...read more

Product Description: Air pollution control can be approached from a number of different engineering disciplines environmental, chemical, civil, and mechanical. To that end, Noel de Nevers has written an engaging overview of the subject. While based on the fundamentals of chemical engineering, the treatment is accessible to readers with only one year of college chemistry...read more

Product Description: From its indefinite beginnings through its broad commercialization and endless reinterpretation, American rock-and-roll music has been preoccupied with an end-of-the-world mentality that extends through the whole of American popular music...read more

Air pollution control can be approached from a number of different engineering disciplines environmental, chemical, civil, and mechanical. To that end, Noel de Nevers has written an engaging overview of the subject. While based on the fundamentals of chemical engineering, the treatment is accessible to readers with only one year of college chemistry. In addition to discussion of individual air pollutants and the theory and practice of air pollution control devices, de Nevers devotes about half the book to topics that influence device selection and design, such as atmospheric models and U.S. air pollution law. The generous number of end-of-chapter problems are designed to develop more complex thinking about the concepts presented and integrate them with readers personal experience increasing the likelihood of deeper understanding. TABLE OF CONTENTS: Introduction to Air Pollution Control / Air Pollution Effects / Air Pollution Control Laws and Regulations, Air Pollution Control Philosophies / Air Pollution Measurements, Emission Estimates / Meteorology for Air Pollution Control Engineers / Air Pollutant Concentration Models / General Ideas in Air Pollution Control / The Nature of Particulate Pollutants / Control of Primary Particulates / Control of Volatile Organic Compounds / Control of Sulfur Oxides / Control of Nitrogen Oxides / The Motor Vehicle Problem / Air Pollutants and Global Climate / Other Topics / Appendixes: Useful Values / Table of Acronyms / Fuels / Elementary Chemistry of Ozone Production / Adsorber Breakthrough Time / Answers to Selected Problems Not-for-sale instructor resource material available to college and university faculty only; contact publisher directly.