Reconstruction Vol. 10, No. 1, 2010
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Editors' Introduction: Religion and Culture / Nate Hinerman & Michael Benton
<1> At a time when many in the U.S. and around the world encounter religion as a polarizing subject, one especially revered by some and utterly contested by others, this special issue of Reconstruction explores questions arising at the intersection of religious experience and popular culture. To engage the relationship of religion and popular culture requires discipline-based, trans-disciplinary, and inter-disciplinary approaches in order to interpret these broad ranges of human experience. As a result, the articles in this issue demonstrate a myriad of methodological approaches.
<2> Over the past three decades, scholarship in the Humanities evaluating the relationships between religion and popular culture has increased dramatically. This particular issue investigates a broad array of perspectives that explore, analyze, and interpret the various interrelations and interactions that exist between religion and popular culture. Despite some recent attention, the role popular culture plays in religious experience is often undervalued. Popular culture not only presents and portrays religious ideas and norms, it also operates as both a vehicle and medium through which religious meaning is communicated and understood. In this issue, articles consider how religion might be imagined as: 1) an expression of doctrinal beliefs and core values; 2) an on-going movement between an individual or community; and 3) a larger socio-cultural matrix, and as essentially a cultural construction. Theological investigations that engage cultural studies from a faith perspective also are included in this issue. Furthermore, at the center of many of these articles (and implied throughout the rest) is an interrogation of the stability of meanings assigned to terms such as "culture," "religion," "popular."
<3> As editors, we sought for inclusion examples of at least one of each of the following four rubrics: religion within popular culture, popular culture within religion, religion as popular culture (and vice versa), or religion in tension with popular culture. Our over-arching goal in this issue was to produce conversations engaging historical, ethnographic, philosophical, artistic, and political modes and elaborate their relationships with religion and/or religious experience, broadly conceived.
<4> Finally, there is a method to our madness (we hope!) here in this issue. As Catholic Theologian Bernard Lonergan, S.J. once wrote: "a method is not a set of rules to be followed meticulously by a dolt. It is a framework for collaborative creativity." Instead, a method is "a pattern of recurrent and related operations yielding cumulative and progressive results." We adopted Lonergan’s methodological approach for this issue, believing that to understand the more latent relationships between religion and culture we must always clarify hypothetical and abstract meanings by studying their practical consequences in a given context. We hope you find in this issue much food for rich thought!
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