Kathryn Lofton’s Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon is a work, first and foremost, of cultural anthropology. The back cover…
spirituality
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…
Reading the paranormal writing us: An interview with Jeffrey Kripal
Jeffrey Kripal, who chairs the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University, is an authority on the mysterious. His books…
De-provincializing Oprah
In Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, Kathryn Lofton holds up a lustrous mirror to the polymorphously perverse dynamics of…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Surviving the secular
Whether you see “the secular” as a threat or a refuge, an option or an impulse, we are all trying…