This is the first lecture for the Religion and Popular Culture Course (RELI 2850 Z) at the University of Lethbridge Edmonton Campus.

3. Cultural Studies
Four Categories of Culture
– Culture as a Standard of Excellence
– Culture as a Way of Life
– Subaltern Cultures
– Popular Culture

5. Criticism of Popular Culture
– Marxist School: Proletariats were sustaining Ruling
Class Ideologies
– Popular Culture is Kitsch
– Not real art
– Distinction between Folk Art and Mass Culture
Frankfurt School

7. Birmingham Centre
Criticism of Popular Culture
– Affinity with disenfranchised
– Connection between Literary Criticism
and Popular Culture texts
– Moved from production to consumption
– Dynamics between Dominate and
Subordinate Groups
– Understood subculture through style,
poaching, simulacrum and hyperreal

8. Example of Poaching
Spoof ads
Adbusters.org

9. Example of Hyperreal
Video Games Comic Books Movies

11. Corbett’s Working Definition
Religion is an integrated system of belief,
lifestyle, ritual activities, and institutions by
which individuals give meaning to (or find
meaning in) their lives by orientating
themselves to what they take as holy, sacred,
or of the highest value.

13. Secularity and Sacredness
Three Paradigms
• Secularization vs. Sacred
Reality
• Secularization Catalyst for
Sacred Realities
• Secular and Sacred Authorities

14. Secular and Sacred are opposed
Secularization is
• Modern in scope
• Will lead to demise of religion
• Irreversible and embedded in Western Civilization
Secularization vs. Sacred Reality

15. Secularization Catalyst for Sacred Realities
• Secularization is continually process
• Religion doesn’t die, it changes
• Religion and secularity have flexible
boundaries

16. Secular and Sacred Authorities
• Secularization is not replacing
religion
• Religious institutions have less
authority
• Understood not as declining
religion by declining scope of
authority

17. Ostwald, Secular Steeples
This change in authority results in ways in which
humans express themselves religiously, so we get a
constant infusion of new religious expressions, new
religions, revival of religions, and new vehicles of
expression which come from outside of traditional
religious institutions and draw upon other cultural
that may or may not be formally related to religious
institutions.

18. … to be continued …