Dieting and Watching 'Star Trek' as Religious Acts

Religion and Popular Culture in America

ed. Bruce David Forbes and Jeffrey H. Mahan

University of California Press

324 pp.

Is a collection of essays like "Religion and Popular Culture in America" as good as its best contributions or as bad as its worst? Weeks from now, when a couple more books and at least as many "Friends" re-runs have intervened, will I remember from this volume William D. Romanowski"s sober assessment of Christian pop music, or Michael Jindra's wishful, ludicrous article, "It's about Faith in Our Future: 'Star Trek' Fandom as Cultural Religion"?

Anthologies resemble theatrical revues, or art salons: brilliant in places, amateurish in others, and ultimately important only if their parts amount to a fresh, intelligent whole. "Religion and Popular Culture in America" avoids the most obvious pitfalls of cultural-studies writing. Absent are the scholastic sentences with opaque syntax masking impoverished ideas. Mostly absent are the cutesy prefixes (exceptions are the odd "(re)productive" and "en-gendering"). The prose is content to say what it means. And so there are many reasons to (re)commend this book.

Mark Hulsether's argument, in "Like a Sermon: Popular Religion in Madonna Videos," that Madonna's music videos supports black and womanist liberation theology may jar Madonna-lovers and religionists alike. The videos, however, which I rented in a fit of nostalgia, bear him out: they develop themes remarkably consonant with the liberationist agenda, and in ways that even the most sensitive observers might miss.

In "The Oriental Monk in American Popular Culture," Jane Naomi Iwamura traces the history of the serene, mystical lama character in American film and television, alerting us to ways that romanticizing the East also unacceptably simplifies it. (I found some omissions curious: Why doesn't she cite Thomas Tweed's book on 19th-century Americans' fascination with Buddhism? How can she overlook the Wu-Tang Clan, which has brought Shaolin mysticism to millions of rap fans?

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