The Big Lebowski (1998) is a classic of American cinema, in large part because of its iconic protagonist, the Dude, whose religio-philosophical allegiances have been popularly framed by Buddhism and Daoism. While such readings are not unfounded, they tend to assume a direct line of influence from those traditions to the Dude. I argue instead that the Dude is best understood through the mediation of Beat Buddhism, particularly as articulated in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. After situating the Dude within the existing scholarship of Buddhist and Daoist imaginaries in American popular culture, I examine Beat Buddhism as a distinctive mode of American Buddhist modernism. I then argue that the Dude represents a post-beat figure whose Beat Buddhist sensibilities are detached from their original literary contexts. Reading the Dude as a dharma bum thus illuminates how Beat Buddhism continues to circulate within popular culture as a style of being rather than a path of practice.
This article explores the evolution of Orthodox apocalyptic discourse surrounding the “mark of the beast,” focusing on how concerns over technology, globalization, and spiritual identity have reshaped traditional eschatology. While early Christian interpretations framed the mark symbolically, modern Orthodox voices—especially from monastic settings like Mount Athos—have recontextualized it in light of digital surveillance and electronic identity systems. Drawing on the influence of prominent figures such as Elder Paisios, as well as key Church documents, the article traces how Protestant eschatological theories were selectively adopted and localized within Orthodox tradition. This process, amplified by monastic authority and legitimized through ecclesiastical institutions, gave rise to a powerful narrative linking technology with spiritual peril. Simultaneously, a bottom-up dynamic emerged, as lay believers and fringe clerics reinterpreted these warnings through conspiracy frameworks, creating hybrid discourses that circulate widely via media and social platforms. The result is a multifaceted phenomenon in which the “mark” serves not only as a theological symbol but as a lens through which Orthodox Christians engage with modern fears of control, loss of autonomy, and moral decline. The article highlights how localization, spiritual authority, and media play vital roles in shaping contemporary Orthodox eschatological imagination.
In a frequently cited quotation, Kazuya Tsurumaki, the assistant director of the popular anime Neon Genesis Evangelion (NGE), claimed that the show’s Christian symbolism is incidental to its overall meaning. As a result of this statement, it has become axiomatic that the religious references in NGE are purely ornamental. In fact, many references cannot be visual flourishes because they are not visual at all. The religious references consist of three types. They are primarily extrabiblical rather than biblical. They are primarily Jewish rather than Christian (although this is not true of the more recent Rebuild films). Finally, they tend to focus on the “mythological” time of Urzeit and Endzeit—the beginning and the end—than any historical references. While NGE does not promote any religion, it is nevertheless part of an ancient and ongoing process of using Judeo-Christian material to compose new religious myths.
The Netflix series Squid Game has become a global cultural parable of survival, violence, and despair. This article asks: What becomes of grace when compassion is punished and moral agency is distorted by coercive systems? Drawing on Karl Rahner’s anonymous grace, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s costly grace, and Simone Weil’s theology of affliction and attention, then anchoring these in Johann Baptist Metz’s “dangerous memory” of victims—this study interprets fleeting acts of mercy, friendship, and self-sacrifice as theological interruptions within a world structured for dehumanization. Through close readings of key scenes, such as: Ali’s trust, Ji-yeong’s sacrifice, Sae-byeok’s dignity, and Gi-hun’s refusal to kill, the paper argues that Squid Game reveals grace not as triumph, but as interruption; fragile acts of fidelity that resist nihilism and bear witness to humanity amid violence. Situated within the dialogue between theology and popular culture, this reading treats the series as a secular parable of grace-in-fracture, where divine fidelity is glimpsed in the persistence of compassion under impossible conditions.
This essay argues that the meaning of the title “Death Eater” in the Harry Potter series is illuminated by ancient personifications of Death as a monster that eats insatiably. Examples include Death, Sheol, and Hades from biblical literature and Christian tradition, the Egyptian goddess Ammit in The Book of the Dead, and the Ugaritic god Mot within The Baal Cycle. After this background is addressed, it is utilized to assess possible meanings for the title “Death Eater,” with the most likely meaning being related to the pursuit of immortality—the Death Eaters aim to eat the thing that never stops eating. Such an ambition reveals the hubris of immortality, and further underscores that Harry Potter consistently critiques immortality as a goal worth chasing. In addition, recognizing this meaning for “Death Eater” allows for a re-evaluation of Harry’s reaction to the epitaph from 1 Corinthians 15:26 on his parents’ tombstone as “a Death Eater idea.” In the light of intertextual links in 1 Corinthians 15 with the eschatological banquet in Isaiah 25, Harry actually spoke better than he knew.
Within the handful of histories studying NBC’s long-running Today, none of that existing scholarship addresses the role of religion in the show’s history or the consistent Christian undertones that permeated the program’s fourth hour, Today with Kathie Lee and Hoda (2008–2019). Drawing on framing theory, this article analyzes archived episodes of the Fourth Hour to illustrate and track how the show’s purview extended beyond home and lifestyle topics, promoting a Christian worldview to viewers through recurring segments on divine intervention, interviews with Christian leaders, and packages highlighting the hosts’ own faith. Through a thematic analysis, this article explores the implications of a broadcast news network allowing hosts Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb to promote non-denominational Christianity across eleven years of weekday programming.
Whitley Strieber is among the most prominent figures writing on ufology and the alien abduction phenomenon. He played a significant role in popularizing the latter via his 1987 book, Communion, and the subsequent film inspired by it (in which Christopher Walken portrayed Strieber). That popularization would in turn have an outsized impact on 1990s pop culture, an impact still felt today. Over the course of many books authored in the intervening decades, Strieber has articulated an evolving spiritual worldview founded largely on his own ongoing experiences with anomalous entities, a worldview in which trauma has a major epistemological function. I provide a summary and assessment of key components of that worldview, and of the experiences upon which it is based.
The Terminator (1984) and Terminator II: Judgment Day (1991), both co-written and directed by James Cameron, reflect upon critical issues concerning posthumanism and the threat of human extinction. Forty years after the first movie’s release, this article reconsiders how these topics shed further light on social tensions that extend beyond human-technology interactions. Drawing inspiration from both gender and religious studies, I analyze how these sci-fi films propagate critiques of the political, economic, and gender power structures of Western society. Additionally, the article explores images from the history of religion in order to analyze these Hollywood spectacles as a secular redemptive narrative that emphasizes the sacredness of human-centric values. I contend that the human-machine conflict serves as a platform for expressing mistrust in society’s “broken system,” echoing the sentiments of marginalized individuals. As such, these movies continue to resonate as poignant reflections on contemporary culture.
This paper moves beyond the center of the theocratic class of the Nigerian Pentecostal circle to explore a marginal Onitsha-based prophet named Chukwuemeka Ohanaemere Odumeje, who claimed the spotlight of Pentecostal theatrics in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and seems to have sustained it by centering himself in popular imagination. I combine a textual analysis of many snippets of media (which are now part of popular culture) and a semiotic analysis of signs and signifiers within both specialized literature in Nigerian Pentecostalism and African popular culture–to examine this imbrication of Pentecostal performativity and popular imagination. I highlight disrupting and dwelling to index resistance or alignment within established Pentecostal performativity and its imbrication with popular culture. Specifically, I use Abimbola Adelakun’s idea of Pentecostal performativity to argue that Odumeje both disrupts and dwells within established Pentecostal performative practices, deploys digital media and popular culture referents in ways that place him in popular imagination, where his sacred spectacle mixes with the quotidian on social media to make him an “incredible pastor.” Together, I show that not only does social media complicate and create room for debating Pentecostal theology, as Adelakun aptly argued, but that by turning our gaze away from politics and Pentecostalism and toward Pentecostal performativity and popular culture, we can extend and recast the field of religion and cultural studies.
Although American sleuth fiction became popular in the late nineteenth century, the first clerical fictional protagonist appeared in 1910 with G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown series. More than five decades later, in the mid-1960s, a rabbi-sleuth protagonist debuted in Harry Kemelman’s weekday Rabbi Small series (Friday the Rabbi Slept Late, Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry, etc.). Following in Kemelman’s footsteps, several authors claim to have been influenced by his works. Rabbi-sleuths, male and female, are found across the denominational spectrum in Judaism: Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Reform Judaism. While there are examples of rabbi-sleuths featured in one-off short stories or novels, we focus on six who appear in series of at least two novels. The rabbis and the locales in which we find them are as follows: Harry Kemelman’s David Small in Barnard’s Crossing, Massachusetts, a town north of Boston; Joseph Telushkin’s Daniel Winter in Los Angeles; Roger Herst’s Gabrielle (Gabby) Lewyn in Washington, D.C.; Sheyna Galyan’s David Cohen in Minneapolis; Ilene Schneider’s Aviva Cohen in Walford, New Jersey, a small town near Philadelphia; and Marvin Wolf’s Ben Maimon in various locales, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Brooklyn, and Pittsburgh. These rabbi-sleuths, like all congregational clergy, are “outsiders within”—part of their communities and yet apart from them. They use their knowledge of Judaism and their rabbinical education, which includes psychology, social studies, and counseling, to unravel mysteries, often murders. They frequently serve as mediators between the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds and explain or comment on Jewish practices and traditions. Building on Rabbi Small as a prototype for the rabbi-sleuths, we explore several key questions in the various series: How do the authors portray their rabbi-sleuths? Do their novels explain Judaism and Jewish practices, traditions, or thought to readers—and if so, how? Do the fictional rabbis act as spokespersons to the non-Jewish world or level social criticism against American Jews and/or broader American values? What is their relationship with their congregations? What insights do we gain into their biographies, familial relationships, education, and theology?
Having a conversion “testimony” and evangelizing nonbelievers by “sharing” that testimony are membership expectations of American evangelical culture. As such, institutional mass media provide guidance on testimony preparation and delivery. This study analyzes online testimonial guides from seven major evangelical organizations. That the guides’ advice is essentially identical suggests that testimonies are life stories by which believers negotiate group membership through self-presentations acceptable to an evangelical generalized other. The guides deploy a shared speech code whose language (re)produces the community’s social order. Meanwhile, a process of mediatization has shifted religious authority from traditional offline authorities to a reliance on media technologies. Introducing media language and logics into the religious sphere has had the effect of reformatting evangelical conversion testimonies in the genre of popular therapy culture.
This article investigates how Egyptian American comedian Ramy Youssef’s 2019 comedy-drama series Ramy disrupts dominant representations of Muslims in US entertainment media. The show explores the first-generation experiences of its titular character and foregrounds topics relevant within American Muslim communities, including the cultivation of Islamic religiosity as a young US Muslim while navigating the social norms of dating, the ethics of sexual practice, and the pursuit of marriage. Analyzing the pilot episode in conversation with scholarship on Islam in media, I argue that Ramy illustrates the parameters of US Muslim inclusion by depicting how its characters negotiate their faith through everyday social decisions. The series offers a critique of the social pressures imposed on American Muslims by the norms of hegemonic secular culture while selectively accommodating these same norms—at times portraying Islam as socially restrictive in contrast to an America characterized as permissive and liberal, particularly regarding sexual mores. Nevertheless, by centering the complexities of American Muslim life, Ramy pioneers a groundbreaking portrayal of Islam on US television—one that resists defining Muslims through Islamophobia and instead presents religiosity in a nuanced and affirmative way, without succumbing to the pressure of portraying likable or morally exemplar characters who uncritically adopt secular values. Through its layered storytelling, Ramy reveals the complex social negotiations young American Muslims must constantly navigate to gain acceptance and belonging in the US, while simultaneously confirming and critiquing their outsider status. Ultimately, the show challenges monolithic portrayals of Muslims and instead offers an authentic and multifaceted depiction of them as individuals who celebrate, wrestle with, and continually reconfigure their faith, thus illustrating the diversity of Muslim experiences and identities and what it truly means to be Muslim in the US today.
Though metal music forms part of the global reception history of John’s Apocalypse and influences the eschatological conceptions of millions of listeners, it has received limited attention in standard textbooks and previous studies. Drawing on L. Cushing Stahlberg’s analytical framework and terminology, this article examines the retellings of the book of Revelation in the lyrics of Metallica’s “The Four Horsemen,” Megadeth’s “Blessed be the Dead,” and Testament’s “Seven Seals.” The analysis highlights both common and distinctive features of these songs in relation to their approach, stance, and filter. In addition to addressing this under-researched material, the article argues that these—and other Metal—retellings of Revelation are not only interesting and significant as innovative and idiosyncratic reinterpretations of the biblical text but also contribute to broader discussions on the formation of contemporary ideas about eschatology.
This article considers straight edge bands as having a “prophetic voice” in a seemingly “secular” subculture, simultaneously critiquing the present and envisioning an alternative future in the tradition of punk and many other forms of music. Straight edge is a global clean-living subculture with roots in the hardcore music scene. The author shows that collectively, straight edge “preachers” inspire many participants to action, to make changes in their lifestyles and engage in contentious politics. The scene and identity become reference points as participants expose and critique social inequalities including racism, patriarchy, and speciesism, amongst others. The author demonstrates that the prophetic imagination is collective, rather than individual; often “secular,” though still imbued with sacred meaning; and especially powerful when embodied by a diversity of marginalized voices. The author concludes by discussing the relationship between individuals, groups, and social structures, considering subcultures as meso-level “laboratories” where participants adopt, create, negotiate, practice, and contest broader social changes. Such groups and meso-level communities serve as spaces of experimentation, where participants engage at the micro-level with broader, macro-level problems.
This article explores content on the YouTube video platform claiming to reveal evidence that giant humans existed in antiquity. After describing this YouTube content, I offer two analyses of these videos: (1) They are a digital instantiation of a longstanding attempt to display giant bones and related artifacts by way of antiquarian interest—dating back to the Bible itself. (2) They can be properly labelled within the genre of “conspiracy.” I turn to focus on theories of conspiracy rhetoric that highlight their value as an aesthetic experience with its own allure, even as a form of re-enchantment for contemporary Bible readers.
This article examines the religious functions of the Dutch performance practice of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. It introduces the phenomenon, highlights its religious and ritual significance in the context of the late modern Netherlands, and interprets the piece through the lens of Hartmut Rosa’s social theory. The article concludes by reflecting on resonance as the common third between religious and aesthetic experiences.
Dutch painter Hans Versteeg’s Madonna del Mare Nostrum (2017) depicts a woman and child wrapped in thermal blankets, seemingly just rescued from the sea. Its composition draws from Christian iconography, particularly Eastern Orthodox icons and Western Madonna-and-Child symbolism, recontextualizing these traditions by applying them to the contemporary, interrelated refugee and climate crises. Through a communication-oriented analysis, the author argues that this painting is an illustrative example of the cultural persistence of the Christian narrative complex in secularized contemporary Western society.
In season 2, episode 4 of the critically acclaimed British television series Fleabag, the eponymous main character speaks to her best friend, Boo, in a flashback following Fleabag’s mother’s funeral. “I don’t know what to do with it,” Fleabag tells Boo. “All the love I have for her.” Here, Fleabag demonstrates what I refer to as affective excess—an overwhelming emotional response that feels too much for an individual to bear alone. In this case, Fleabag feels too much love for her mother but has no mother to receive it. Boo responds in her typical, guileless way: “I’ll take it. No, I’m serious. It sounds lovely.” The series implies that Fleabag channeled her love for her mother, and the grief accompanying her death, into her relationship with Boo. However, after Boo also dies, the viewer is introduced to one of the show’s central questions: Where can one place their affective excess when the usual channels are no longer available? The show explores how the intersecting demands on Fleabag—as both a feminist and a neoliberal postfeminist agent—leave her without an adequate outlet for unburdening her excess grief and guilt, ultimately rendering healing and relief impossible. Despite her avowed atheism, Fleabag appears to eventually find relief through spiritual means, specifically confession. This article argues that while Fleabag offers a powerful feminist critique of neoliberal society, it also presents an implicit reflection of the limits of feminism and advocates for a transcendent element in human relationships as the only adequate place to unburden affective excess.
"Theology and Horror: Explorations of the Dark Religious Imagination." The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, 0(aop), pp. –
Many interpretations of fandom communities as religious focus on fandom in relation to the “world religions” and the institutional authority they carry. By way of contrast, the author aims to interpret fandom based on religious practice, primarily the Christian Cult of the Saints as a practice of religious devotion. The perspective of religious practice emphasizes that the communities that form as fandom often exist in tension with more traditional religious networks, similar to saint cults. To demonstrate this parallelism, the author explores community formation around saints and fantasy characters as serious play expressed in books of hours and fanzines.
