{"id":3841,"date":"2011-03-25T00:14:34","date_gmt":"2011-03-25T00:14:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=3841"},"modified":"2011-03-25T01:35:41","modified_gmt":"2011-03-25T01:35:41","slug":"the-integration-of-religion-and-popular-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=3841","title":{"rendered":"The integration of religion and popular culture"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[ by <strong>Charles Cameron<\/strong> ]<\/p>\n<p>*<\/p>\n<p>Yesterday, I stumbled on the account of <strong>pole dancing for Jesus<\/strong> with the accompanying graphic. I was a little taken aback, I&#8217;ll admit, but Jesus didn&#8217;t confine his ministry to the pious and scholarly, he befriended women of questionable morals and enforcers from the Roman mob as I recall, or &#8220;publicans and sinners&#8221; to give them slightly more pleasant names \u2013 so I sat up, took notice, downloaded the image, and re-sized it to fit in the top position of one of my <strong>DoubleQuotes<\/strong> \u2013 while wondering if I&#8217;d have to wait till Doomsday to find a suitable companion piece.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/quopole-dancing.jpg\" title=\"quopole-dancing.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"585\" src=\"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/quopole-dancing.jpg\" alt=\"quopole-dancing.jpg\" height=\"625\" \/><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>All in a day&#8217;s screen-gazing, I wound up watching the <strong>Wong Kar-Wai<\/strong> film, <strong><em>Fallen Angels<\/em><\/strong>, last night, and lo: the screen-shot in the lower part of the DoubleQuote revealed itself.<\/p>\n<p>There are interesting paradoxes embedded in each image, of course, pitting what you might call &#8220;deep&#8221; theology against pious expectation \u2013 but they also illustrate another matter of some interest to me, the degree to which religion is now richly integrated into popular culture.<\/p>\n<p>*<\/p>\n<p>My second DoubleQuote, which contains today&#8217;s haul, deals with the same theme, I suppose &#8212; this time showing how what used to be the separate realms of <strong>science fiction<\/strong> and <strong>religion<\/strong> are now intermingled, with <strong>Minister Farrakhan<\/strong> speaking of an &#8220;end times&#8221; space craft that is an integral part of NoI eschatology in his annual <strong><em>Saviours&#8217; Day speech<\/em><\/strong>, while alien aircraft flown by religious robots feature in a tongue-in-cheek news report about the war over Libya from <strong>Spencer Ackerman<\/strong> at the Wired War Room.<\/p>\n<p>It is perhaps not surprising that Minister Farrakhan also cites <strong>Scientology<\/strong> with approval in the same speech, nor that that religion was itself the offspring of science fiction writer <strong>L Ron Hubbard<\/strong>. We are in a fertile period for the religious imagination, I believe, grappling to find new ways to answer the age-old questions &#8212; and science fiction and &#8220;signs in the skies&#8221; are among the vehicles, along with new religious movements and old religions renewed, by which we are coming to terms with life in this post-nuclear age\u2026<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><a href=\"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/quosigns-in-the-sky.gif\" title=\"quosigns-in-the-sky.gif\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"585\" src=\"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/quosigns-in-the-sky.gif\" alt=\"quosigns-in-the-sky.gif\" height=\"624\" \/><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;m not much of a prophet, but I predict that the confluence of science fiction with religion will prove to be one of the keys to an understanding of our times&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[ by Charles Cameron ] * Yesterday, I stumbled on the account of pole dancing for Jesus with the accompanying graphic. I was a little taken aback, I&#8217;ll admit, but Jesus didn&#8217;t confine his ministry to the pious and scholarly, he befriended women of questionable morals and enforcers from the Roman mob as I recall, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556,526,497,389,21,215,444,388,394,501,533,599,31,1,235],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-air-force","category-charles-cameron","category-christianity","category-counterintuitive","category-creativity","category-culture","category-fiction","category-innovation","category-meme","category-myth","category-religion","category-science-fiction","category-synthesis","category-uncategorized","category-wired"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3841\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}