popular culture

Indignant responses to the Janet Jackson nipple slip and the somber post-9/11 halftime show reveal glimpses of the sanctity of this yearly ritual, but it’s also in the creation of icons, the reinforcement of rules, and Americans telling themselves stories about themselves.

The company whose founders helped finance the modern conservative movement is returning home to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary.

Former pastor Ted Haggard is desperate for redemption, but he can’t do the one thing that might make it possible—admit and accept that he’s gay.

There’s something about American evangelical life that tends toward the production of these sex sagas and tonight’s HBO documentary on Haggard airs just as new dimensions of the sex scandal emerge.

Prayers For Bobby, a new Lifetime TV movie, portrays the tragic struggle of a gay teen in a conservative Christian family and the family’s attempt to “heal” him. Predictably, the film was heavily criticized by the religious right.

In the same way that actual radicals were chic among left-leaning socialites in the late seventies, NASCAR and pork rinds were a mark of authenticity for conservatives throughout the Bush years. But now some Republicans are rethinking their down-market identities.

When Daniel Hauser and his mother, members of new Native American religion the Nemenhah Band, opted out of chemotherapy and fled to Mexico, the media were ready with a religion vs. medicine narrative.

Buying locally reminds us that purchasing is a mythical act that cements us to community in some magical way. But what if the very morality of a “local” act is being marketed in its own right? Is it just as moral to help a Palestinian cultural center build community as it is to buy Cisco products whose ads promise the same?

Two examples of transposition from one culture or location to another, and both work surprisingly well.

A friend once asked Diana Butler Bass why she was still a Christian. The answer lies in the question of spiritual memory, and of a community that exists through time.