Where is the religion in this case and what kind of religion is it?
Is Masterpiece Cakeshop a church?
consumerism
Who do you want me to be?
A couple years ago, while watching television and rocking a restless infant to sleep, an advertisement for the website ancestry.com…
Theologies of American exceptionalism: Moreton and Paarlberg
"For its proponents, Americans and perhaps others, Christian free enterprise is not a religion but a natural way of being,…
The Virtues of Abandon
In 1698 the Parlement of Dijon found a Catholic priest guilty of engaging in sex with members of his flock.…
Los Angeles Review of Books reviews Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon
The Los Angeles Review of Books recently reviewed TIF editor-at-large Kathryn Lofton’s book Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon.
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…
Oprah the Omnipotent
Lofton tells me she shares with Jonathan Z. Smith the view that difference is the beginning of any good conversation.…
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…
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…
De-provincializing Oprah
In Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, Kathryn Lofton holds up a lustrous mirror to the polymorphously perverse dynamics of…