“The Lives of Great Religious Books,” a promising new series from Princeton University Press, debuted this month with three titles—Martin…
Moments from the lives of great religious books
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.
Oprah, the Rorschach test
Focusing on Oprah as an icon/inkblot, we can use our reactions to her as a Rorschach test: What do we…
OMG: Oprah Winfrey, pop religion, and the temple of our familiar
I have been—and perhaps in some ways will always be—one of the denizens, the followers, the 100% skeptical and yet…
“I would love to read the biography of a book . . .”
As part of our discussion of the “Lives of Great Religious Books” series out this March from Princeton University Press,…
De-provincializing Oprah
In Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, Kathryn Lofton holds up a lustrous mirror to the polymorphously perverse dynamics of…
Divine pervasion and the change that isn’t
Pervasive presence—or just ordinary ubiquity—is one of the main strategies in Oprah’s attempt to serve as a guide through the…
O tedious selfhood, O aftertaste of splinters
It’s striking to me how often, with what little resistance, the many scholarly forums this book has now generated have…
O is for Ozarks
O is for Oprah. O is for Ozarks. Can the second embrace the first? Though Lofton stays away from the…
Oprah the Omnipotent
Lofton tells me she shares with Jonathan Z. Smith the view that difference is the beginning of any good conversation.…
Every moment an Aha! Moment!
Kathryn Lofton’s Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon is a work, first and foremost, of cultural anthropology. The back cover…