Tag: Popular culture

Greg Garrett has abstracted seven popular-culture properties from 2010 that made a real difference in the world of publicly lived theology.

“I never thought I’d live to see the day when stuttering would be the subject of a serious mainstream movie. The condition, after all, has been coded as a joke in popular culture, one of the few disabilities considered fair game for laughs.”

Kathleen Parker lists her resolutions for the coming year, but instead of listing ones specifically for 2011, she lists her timeless ones. She calls it a sort of “Eat, Pray, Love 2.0”.

A wandering soul with an internet connection looking for spiritual sustenance in this holy season can find all matter of wonders. There’s the Huffington Post’s 10 best religion books of the year feature, Scott Gunn’s blog posting on the world’s worst Advent calendars, and the winners of Stephen Prothero’s Make Your Own Religion contest, which he ran in a class at Boston University.

The Catholic League and the American Atheists are duking it out on either side of the Lincoln Tunnel this year.

Stories are dangerous. They have the ability to re-make the world; to take us outside of ourselves, and make real the experiences, feelings, and situations of other people in other places. Stories activate our imaginations and rearrange the furniture of our minds. This is why narrative—may it take the form of myth, folklore, parable, or history—has always been such an integral part of religious life and the formation of religious imagination.