Visions of the End: Secular Apocalypse in Recent Hollywood Film

In response to John Lyden\u27s paper, To Commend or Critique? The Question of Religion and Film Studies, (JR & F vol. 1, no. 2) this paper explores how contemporary popular culture and traditional religion interact. I argue that films and other popular cultural forms can both commend and critique social and religious norms when they themselves function religiously. To illustrate this, I turn to the apocalyptic imagination as it is appropriated in two popular, American films, Waterworld and Twelve Monkeys. With these two films, we can see that popular culture has taken a traditional religious concept (the apocalypse) and secularized it for a contemporary, popular audience. That these films find the idea of the apocalypse somehow meaningful suggests that they are functioning religiously

Armageddon at the Millennial Dawn

The New Year has come and gone and presents a time for reflection on popular culture\u27s fascination with eschatology and apocalypticism. In the few years leading up to the year 2000, we witnessed a growing interest in end-of-the-world scenarios as they were portrayed in the movies and other forms of popular entertainment. Looking back but a short while, our imaginations were stimulated by such movies as 12 Monkeys, the critically abused Waterworld, the comedic Independence Day, and the visionary Contact. These promising movies suggested the last couple of years of the millennium would see a crop of creative movies that would be based on the eschatological drama. Movies such as Deep Impact and Armageddon promised to explore the idea of the end of existence by drawing on a culture\u27s rich tradition of symbolic imagery associated with Jewish and Christian apocalyptic upheaval, but they were generally perceived to lack depth and originality. The release of the controversial and dazzling The Matrix added a new twist to the various conceptions of the end of civilization. As one looks back at some of these films, a few general characteristics stand out that frame a contemporary and popular millennial imagination as it has been communicated through popular cinema. I will use this paper to explore such themes in four of these films (Contact, Deep Impact, Armageddon, and The Matrix) and to discuss what insight this brings to contemporary cultural studies

Religion and Popular Movies

A few years ago, I was lecturing on John\u27s Revelation in a New Testament course when a student approached me after class with a question. He wanted to know if I had seen the movie The Seventh Sign and if it was based on the Christian Apocalypse. Unaware that Demi Moore had just appeared in a movie by that title, I assumed the student was referring to Ingmar Bergman\u27s The Seventh Seal and answered him accordingly. He quickly corrected me and challenged me to see The Seventh Sign. I watched the movie soon after that, and although it was not the greatest film I had seen, I used it as a basis for class discussion. The student response was phenomenal. Most had seen the movie and were eager to participate in class discussion. The resulting enthusiasm and common ground of material energized our class work on apocalypticism for several class periods. From the success of that experiment, I reevaluated my teaching and course materials and decided to explore using films in my religion classes. This seemed to be a logical extension of my teaching since my training is in religion and culture and religion and literature. I quickly discovered, however, that skills in literary analysis do not necessarily translate to or correlate with film analysis, and I began to retrain myself in the methods of film studies in order to incorporate films in my classes. My learning resulted in Screening the Sacred, a volume of essays on religion and popular American films I co-edited with my colleague, Joel Martin. Meanwhile, I was discovering more and more how films can serve as powerful tools in the classroom

Yoga jam: remixing Kirtan in the Art of Living

Yoga Jam are a group of musicians in the United Kingdom who are active members of the Art of Living, a transnational Hindu-derived meditation group. Yoga Jam organize events—also referred to as yoga raves and yoga remixes—that combine Hindu devotional songs (bhajans) and chants (mantras) with modern Western popular musical genres, such as soul, rock, and particularly electronic dance music. This hybrid music is often played in a clublike setting, and dancing is interspersed with yoga and meditation. Yoga jams are creative fusions of what at first sight seem to be two incompatible phenomena—modern electronic dance music culture and ancient yogic traditions. However, yoga jams make sense if the Durkheimian distinction between the sacred and the profane is challenged, and if tradition and modernity are not understood as existing in a sort of inverse relationship. This paper argues that yoga raves are authenticated through the somatic experience of the modern popular cultural phenomenon of clubbing combined with therapeutic yoga practices and validated by identifying this experience with a reimagined Vedic tradition

Dos-A-Cero: US Soccer Mythology and Columbus, Ohio

This edited volume considers the U.S.-Mexico soccer rivalry, which occurs against a complex geo-political, social, and economic backdrop. Multidisciplinary contributions explore how a long and complicated history between these countries has produced a unique rivalry―one in which loyalties split friends and family; fan turnout in many regions of the U.S. favors Mexico; and games are imbued with both national pride and politics. The themes of nationhood, geography, citizenship, acculturation, identity, globalization, narrative and mythology reverberate throughout this book, especially with regard to how they shape place, identity, and culture.https://nsuworks.nova.edu/shss_facbooks/1124/thumbnail.jp