Sensational Devotion

Sensational Devotion
Author: Jill Stevenson
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2013-04-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0472118730

In Sensational Devotion, Jill Stevenson examines a range of evangelical performances, including contemporary Passion plays, biblical theme parks, Holy Land re-creations, creationist museums, and megachurches, to understand how they serve their evangelical audiences while shaping larger cultural and national dialogues. Such performative media support specific theologies and core beliefs by creating sensual, live experiences for believers, but the accessible, familiar forms they take and the pop culture motifs they employ also attract nonbelievers willing to “try out” these genres, even if only for curiosity’s sake. This familiarity not only helps these performances achieve their goals, but it also enables them to contribute to public dialogue about the role of religious faith in America. Stevenson shows how these genres are significant and influential cultural products that utilize sophisticated tactics in order to reach large audiences comprised of firm believers, extreme skeptics, and those in between. Using historical research coupled with personal visits to these various venues, the author not only critically examines these spaces and events within their specific religious, cultural, and national contexts, but also places them within a longer devotional tradition in order to suggest how they cultivate religious belief by generating vivid, sensual, affectively oriented, and individualized experiences.

Devotions for a Sensational Life

Devotions for a Sensational Life
Author: Women of Faith,
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Total Pages: 112
Release: 2004-03-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1418569798

Too many of us live lives characterized by boredom or even hopelessness. But God has given us everything we need to experience the abundant life He has planned for each of us. His love is boundless; His grace is extravagant; and His joy is outrageous. Because of this, we can experience a life that is sensational-regardless of our circumstances. This newest devotional in the line of best-selling Women of Faith devotion series features writers such as: Sheila Walsh Thelma Wells Barbara Johnson Becky Tirabassi Joni Eareckson Tada Liz Curtis Higgs And more. Devotions for a Sensational Life...providing the grace and strength not only to survive life, but to live it to the fullest!

Playing God

Playing God
Author: Henry Bial
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2015-08-20
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0472052926

A fascinating look at how the Bible has inspired Broadway plays and musicals, from Ben-Hur to Jesus Christ Superstar

Religious Periodicals and Publishing in Transnational Contexts

Religious Periodicals and Publishing in Transnational Contexts
Author: Anja-Maria Bassimir
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2017-06-23
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1443878502

This volume explores the interrelationship of religion and print practices, and sheds new light on the history of religious publishing in a globalizing world and its changing media consumption. Periodicals have recently become of interest to scholars in book history and religious studies, as they try to determine how magazines, journals, newsletters, and newspapers meet the diverse spiritual demands of believers conditioned by an increasingly translocal and pluralistic religious landscape in modern America and beyond. Existing publications in this field have produced new insights into the multilayered nineteenth- and twentieth-century publishing enterprises, as well as the numerous actors behind them, often crossing ethnic, gender, and national boundaries. This volume focuses instead on the socio-economic conditions, institutional organizations, action networks, and communicative environments that shape religious publishing and its medial apparatus in transnational contexts. In doing so, the authors study the material devices, business structures, and cultural networks needed for circulating words and images that nourish specific formations of religious adherence.

Transgressive Devotion

Transgressive Devotion
Author: Natalie Wigg-Stevenson
Publisher: SCM Press
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2021-02-28
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 033405947X

Academic theology is in need of a new genre. In "Transgressive Devotion" Natalie Wigg-Stevenson articulates a theological vision of that genre as performance art. She argues that theology done as performance art stops trying to describe who God is, and starts trying to make God appear. Recognising that the act of studying theology or practicing ministry is always a performance, where the boundaries between what we see, feel, experience and learn are not just blurred but potentially invisible, Wigg-Stevenson brings together ethnographic theological fieldwork, historical and contemporary Christian theological traditions, and performance artworks themselves. A daring vision of theology which will energise anybody feeling ‘boxed in’ by the discipline, Transgressive Devotion blurs borders between orthodoxy, heterodoxy and heresy to reveal how the very act of doing theology makes God and humanity vulnerable to each other. This is theology which is a liturgy of Divine incantation. In other words: this is theology which is also prayer.

The Esoteric

The Esoteric
Author: Hiram Erastus Butler
Publisher:
Total Pages: 526
Release: 1889
Genre: Occultism
ISBN:

Christian Tourist Attractions, Mythmaking, and Identity Formation

Christian Tourist Attractions, Mythmaking, and Identity Formation
Author: Erin Roberts
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2018-11-29
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1350006211

Christian Tourist Attractions, Mythmaking, and Identity Formation examines a sampling of contemporary Christian tourist attractions that position visitors as the inheritors of ancient, sacred traditions and make claims about the truth of the historical narratives that they promote. Rather than approaching these attractions as sacred expressions of religious experience or as uncontested accounts of history, the book applies recent work on mythmaking and identity formation to argue that these presentations of the past function as strategic discourses that serve material concerns in the present. From an approach informed by social and materialist theories of religion, the volume draws upon a variety of methodological approaches that enable readers to understand the often-bewildering array of objects, claims, demands, and activities (not to mention the seemingly endless array of gifts and personal items available for purchase) that appear at attractions including Ark Encounter, the Creation Museum, the Holy Land Experience, Bible Walk Museum, Christian Zionist tours of Israel, and the recently opened Museum of the Bible. Discourse analysis, practice theory, rhetorical criticism, and embodied theories of cognition help make sense not only of the Christian tourist attractions under examination but also of the ways that “religion” is entangled with contemporary social, political, and economic interests more broadly.