Just imagine how an ironic British observer of America such as Martin Amis would have handled this. It would have been easy to crack a joke about fathers and daughters in the Purity Ball. This kind of subject matter is unusual for scholars of religion, and many of the cases presented are rather disagreeable from the point of view of the typical liberal academic.
The point of departure is a ritual invented by family-focused Evangelicals in which fathers affirm their role as protectors of their adolescent daughters’ virginal selves by collectively spinning in circles in a ballroom after a three-course dinner and a public signing of purity pledges. For instance, a chapter called “Ritualism revived” shows how old and bitter debates about ritual and ritualism in Anglo-American Protestantism have come to be articulated through the marketplace today. Lofton’s most interesting discussions are contextualised by her knowledge of modern American cultural and religious history and situated in the debates taking place in the discipline known as religious studies and history of religions in different parts of the world. Sometimes Lofton becomes a little hectic – as when presenting a brief history of religion and celebrity over a mere eight pages, but in sum Consuming Religion is an elegant, critical, wide-ranging and thought-provoking account of religion and spirituality in America today.
Consuming Religion seems like a natural next step for her as a scholar and critical observer of American religion and celebrity culture, but this time around the net is cast wider and the catch includes names such as Britney Spears, the Kardashians, Mel Gibson and Madonna. In a 2011 book called Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, Kathryn Lofton read Oprah Winfrey’s television shows as proposals for a spiritual revolution fusing consumer behaviour with celebrity ambition and religious idioms.
0 kommentar(er)
