Oprah is a compelling object for the scholarly study of religion as a contemporary phenomenon. She is mass-mediated, commercial, and…
Spirituality, mediation, consumption
Book blog
Scholars from varying disciplines engage in critical discussions of recent books. Additionally, scholars introduce their books with an original essay or, occasionally, an original essay reviews an important new book, connecting it to other threads of conversation in the academy and beyond.
You can read our very first book forum, on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and the continued discussion around Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age here.
Will Oprah Winfrey save us all?
Oprah Winfrey is the single most powerful woman in media. She presides over a multi-billion dollar empire as both mogul…
“The hegemony of her sway”
Oprah’s “gift is not her interviewing strategy but her confessional promiscuity.” While claiming only to tell you what she herself…
Spirituality: what remains?
To use the concept of spirituality analytically is enormously difficult. There comes a point in reading this book when one…
Surviving the secular
Whether you see “the secular” as a threat or a refuge, an option or an impulse, we are all trying…
The “great sinner” myth
Confessions re-emerged into floodlit attention in the Romantic era of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when it was…
The birth of a book
An old photograph provides a glimpse into a dismal cell at a Nazi prison called Tegel. Wan light falls in…
The evolution of a text
In his 1915 essay, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” Sigmund Freud wrote, “It is indeed impossible to…
Holy City (a history of Chicago’s future)
Pilgrims immediately flooded the City of Chicago when Oprah Winfrey left this earth on Her 120th birthday. Millions of global devotees…
Adrift on common dreams
What a strange, provocative experience it has been to dwell with Kathryn Lofton’s Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon during…