Consuming religion
Diane Winston on the Pew Forum’s U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey: In fact what’s most vexing about Americans’ religious illiteracy barely made headlines. Armed only with our ignorance, are we ready for...
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What is Oprah?: An interview with Kathryn Lofton
In Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, just out from University of California Press, Yale religion professor Kathryn Lofton orchestrates an encounter between American religious history and daytime...
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Spirituality, mediation, consumption
Oprah is a compelling object for the scholarly study of religion as a contemporary phenomenon. She is mass-mediated, commercial, and famous—and spiritual, if by that we mean something that is not...
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Surviving the secular
Kathryn Lofton argues that “Oprah is a way to survive the secular.” This is a brilliant, keen, insightful, clever, and ultimately illuminating encapsulation of Lofton’s book-length exploration of Oprah...
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Oprah, the Rorschach test
Kathryn Lofton does an excellent job of documenting how Oprah has achieved her icon status through her genius at synthesizing multiple strands of religiosity and spiritualism with secular ideas of...
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OMG: Oprah Winfrey, pop religion, and the temple of our familiar
If, like me, you’ve filled up your sabbatical time this year logging countless hours of watching The Oprah Winfrey Show’s Season 25: The Farewell Season, as well as its behind-the-scenes sister show on...
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De-provincializing Oprah
In Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, Kathryn Lofton holds up a lustrous mirror to the polymorphously perverse dynamics of boom and bust, surplus and lack, and redemptive optimism and paranoid anxiety that...
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Divine pervasion and the change that isn’t
The question that circles while one is reading Kathryn Lofton’s Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon is this: just how wide, just how permeable, just how enveloping is the O of Oprah? According to Lofton,...
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O tedious selfhood, O aftertaste of splinters
I begin, perhaps inevitably, with a confession: I am just not an Oprah sort of woman, a possibility that Kathryn Lofton allows for in the latter half of Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, but which had...
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Oprah the Omnipotent
Kathryn Lofton’s new book on Oprah Winfrey sparkles with coruscating turns of phrase and often glittering analysis of American religion and consumer culture. “Oprah is an instance of American...
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Every moment an Aha! Moment!
“What’s really outstanding about those moments is usually when you hear something like that, it’s—it’s—it’s reminding you of what you already know. That’s what the aha is, ‘cause it feels like, “I knew...
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Los Angeles Review of Books reviews Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon
The Los Angeles Review of Books recently reviewed TIF editor-at-large Kathryn Lofton’s book Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon. The review compliments Lofton’s thorough examination of Oprah as an icon,...
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The Virtues of Abandon
In 1698 the Parlement of Dijon found a Catholic priest guilty of engaging in sex with members of his flock. Philibert Robert, the cleric in question, characterized the sexual abandon he and the women...
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Theologies of American exceptionalism: Moreton and Paarlberg
Oliver Laric Sun Tzu Janus, 2012 24.2 x 40 x 29.7 cm Plinth: 80 x 32 x 29 cm (LARIC-2012-0024) Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin The paired posts in this series were developed in...
View ArticleWho do you want me to be?
Have you ever looked into your family’s genealogy? If so, what did you hope to find? Considering the popularity of shows like Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Finding Your Roots and TLC’s Who Do You Think You...
View ArticleIs Masterpiece Cakeshop a church?
On Monday, June 4, 2018, the US Supreme Court announced its decision in this term’s religion case, Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. Most news stories on this decision...
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