“Dressed in an Angel's Nightshirt”: Jesus and the BBC

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith Veldman
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Cultural Influence ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Radio Drama ◽  
Religious Broadcasting ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Popular Religiosity ◽  
Popular Television

AbstractThis article examines images of Jesus broadcast on the BBC from the 1930s through the 1950s. During these years, the BBC sought to use its cultural influence to replace popular religiosity with what the clerics who staffed its Religious Broadcasting Department (RBD) regarded as a more masculine, modern, and vigorous national religious faith. To achieve this aim, the RBD marshaled the might of British New Testament scholarship and its image of a warrior-like, apocalyptic historical Jesus. Yet the RBD's hopes of bridging the gap between popular religiosity and its own vision of Christianity went unrealized. Programs on Jesus that reached a genuinely national audience—The Man Born to be King, Dorothy L. Sayers's wartime radio drama, andJesus of Nazareth, a popular television series from the 1950s—instead featured Anglicized and ahistorical images deeply embedded within British popular culture. The story of Jesus on the BBC highlights both this popular culture's strength and Christian Britain's fragmentation.

scholarly journals “But in the Thunder, I Still Hear Thor”: The Character Athelstan as a Narrative Focal Point in the Series Vikings

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 203
Author(s):  
Margaret Steenbakker
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Television Series ◽  
World Views ◽  
Negative Picture ◽  
Popular Television ◽  
Medieval Christianity ◽  
Eventual Death ◽  
The Way

This article explores the way the character Athelstan serves as a narrative focal point in the popular television series Vikings. Using this series as its main case study, it addresses the question of the ways in which the character functions as a synthesis between the two opposing world views of Christianity and Norse religion that are present in the series. After establishing that Vikings is a prime example of the trend to romanticize Viking culture in popular culture, I will argue that while the character Athelstan functions as a narrative focal point in which the worlds can be united and are united for a while, his eventual death when he has reverted back to Christianity shows that the series ultimately favors Viking culture and paints a very negative picture of (medieval) Christianity indeed.

scholarly journals Between neo-Ottomanism and Ottomania: navigating state-led and popular cultural representations of the past

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 33-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Murat Ergin ◽  
Yağmur Karakaya
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Cultural Representations ◽  
Television Series ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ottoman History ◽  
Historical Truth ◽  
Popular Television ◽  
Depth Interviews

AbstractIn contemporary Turkey, a growing interest in Ottoman history represents a change in both the official state discourse and popular culture. This nostalgia appropriates, reinterprets, decontextualizes, and juxtaposes formerly distinct symbols, ideas, objects, and histories in unprecedented ways. In this paper, we distinguish between state-led neo-Ottomanism and popular cultural Ottomania, focusing on the ways in which people in Turkey are interpellated by these two different yet interrelated discourses, depending on their social positions. As the boundary between highbrow and popular culture erodes, popular cultural representations come to reinterpret and rehabilitate the Ottoman past while also inventing new insecurities centering on historical “truth.” Utilizing in-depth interviews, we show that individuals juxtapose the popular television seriesMuhteşem Yüzyıl(The Magnificent Century) with what they deem “proper” history, in the process rendering popular culture a “false” version. We also identify four particular interpretive clusters among the consumers of Ottomania: for some, the Ottoman Empire was the epitome of tolerance, where different groups lived peacefully; for others, the imperial past represents Turkish and/or Islamic identities; and finally, critics see the empire as a burden on contemporary Turkey.

scholarly journals “Sometimes a Bee Can Move an Ox”: Biblical Epics and One Man's Quest to Promote Jewish Values in Blacklist-Era Hollywood

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-194
Author(s):  
Andrew Paul
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Motion Picture ◽  
Liberal Humanism ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Biblical Epics

In the 1950s, the top American Jewish organizations chose a single man, John Stone, to represent their collective interests in Hollywood. Over the course of the decade, Stone's Motion Picture Project sought to prevent antisemitism on film and to inspire the creation of positive Jewish characters. Negotiating the cultural politics of the era, however, resulted in an increasing tendency to favor depictions of biblical Jews over contemporary American ones. In a strange twist, Stone endorsed no film with as much zeal asBen-Hur, a New Testament celebration of Jesus. By following Stone's tortuous attempts to navigate Cold War controversies, and by casting new light on the phenomenal success of biblical epics in the 1950s, this essay suggests that at the heart of postwar popular culture was a shift toward a particular discourse of liberal humanism.

How American Newspaper Comic Strips Portray God, Angels, and Humans

2020 ◽  
pp. 398-413
Author(s):  
Leonard Greenspoon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Online Media ◽  
Comic Strip ◽  
Comic Strips ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Texts

The comic strip as a mainstay of print and more recently online media is an American invention that began its development in the last decades of the 1800s. For many decades in the mid-twentieth century, comic strips were among the most widely disseminated forms of popular culture. With their succession of panels, pictures, and pithy perspectives, comics have come to cover an array of topics, including religion. This chapter looks at how the Bible (Old and New Testament) figures in comic strips, focusing specifically on three areas: the depiction of the divine, renderings of specific biblical texts, and how comic strips can function as sites in which religious identity and controversies play out. Relevant examples are drawn from several dozen strips. Special attention is also paid to a few, like Peanuts and BC, in which biblical imagery, ideology, and idiom are characteristically portrayed in distinctive ways.

Digitization of Old Chinese Bibles (pre-1950s)

2017 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Wong
Keyword(s):  
Phase I ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Mandarin Chinese ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Phase Ii ◽  
Full Text ◽  
Old Chinese ◽  
Final Goal ◽  
Classical Chinese ◽  
The 1950S

The program “Digitization of Old Chinese Bibles,” likely the largest digitization program for Chinese Bibles ever undertaken, began in August 2014 under the auspices of the Digital Bible Library (DBL), an initiative of the United Bible Societies with the aim of gathering, validating, and safeguarding Scripture texts and publication assets ( https://thedigitalbiblelibrary.org/home/ ). The completion of Phase I in April 2016 also marked the launch of Phase II of the program. By the time the present article is published, a majority of twenty-two Chinese Bibles (full or New Testament) will have been full-text digitized and uploaded to DBL for wider distribution. The final goal of the digitization program is to digitize all thirty-three extant complete Chinese New Testaments or full Bibles—whether in Wenli (classical) Chinese or Mandarin Chinese—published prior to the 1950s. The purpose of the article is to report on this program, what it entails, and the challenges it faces.

The Uses of the Bible

The Bible ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Coogan
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Influence ◽  
Reception History ◽  
The Bible

What is reception history? Reception history is a scholarly term for what we could call the study of the afterlives of the Bible: how, since it was being formed, the Bible has been used, from popular culture to high art. Such cultural influence of canonical...

Voice Change in Pop Culture

2019 ◽  
pp. 77-132
Author(s):  
Bridget Sweet
Keyword(s):  
Pop Culture ◽  
Music Educators ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Voice Change ◽  
Media Portrayals ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Music Television ◽  
Adolescent Voice ◽  
Popular Television ◽  
The Way

The chapter discusses the way popular understanding and misunderstanding of voice change is largely perpetuated by mainstream media. Portrayals of voice change distributed via music, television, and movies have contributed to a simulacrum of adolescent voice change, a situated reality not based in fact but accepted in pop culture. The generally embraced perception of voice change is that it is a time of humiliation, anxiety, turmoil, and dread. Voice change is not always pleasant, but students and music educators perceive and approach the experience with such angst and trepidation well before it begins that is rarely given the opportunity to be something positive or exciting. The chapter examines and distills episodes of The Brady Bunch, The Wonder Years, and The Goldbergs, popular television series that spanned a period of more than 40 years, each with an episode focused on the adolescent changing voice.

scholarly journals Misterchef? Cooks, Chefs and Gender in MasterChef Australia

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Herkes ◽  
Guy Redden
Keyword(s):  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Professional Standard ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Culinary Arts ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Australian History ◽  
Gendered Patterns ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Popular Television

Abstract MasterChef Australia is the most popular television series in Australian history. It gives a wide range of ordinary people the chance to show they can master culinary arts to a professional standard. Through content and textual analysis of seven seasons of the show this article examines gendered patterns in its representation of participants and culinary professionals. Women are often depicted as home cooks by inclination while the figure of the professional chef remains almost exclusively male. Despite its rhetoric of inclusivity, MCA does little to challenge norms of the professional gastronomic field that have devalued women’s cooking while valorising “hard” masculinized culinary cultures led by men.

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