DESCRIPTION:

This course is designed as a graduate seminar and is open to a limited number of master's level students with permission of the instructor. The course will engage students in a two-way conversation between popular culture and theology. Students will develop critical skills both in listening and in responding theologically to popular expressions found in advertising, celebrity, television, movies, music, art, fashion and sports. It will focus both on how our society's commitments to consumerism, celebrity and sexuality are played out aesthetically in a variety of emerging technologies, and how the Church has/might/should engage with this culture.

Preparation for ministry too often assumes students already possess skills in cultural engagement and analysis. This course will provide students a critical and theological framework for understanding popular culture. While such a perspective is not sufficient for effective ministry in our contemporary world, it is supportive of, if not necessary for, it.

This seminar will combine discussion, student presentation, and occasional lecture. The class will meet weekly for three hours. During each session students will first consider/critique a current theological assessment of popular culture and then consider a particular expression of popular culture.

a. Pop Culture

Arnold, Rebecca. Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the 20^th C. Tauris.

Basquiat. d. Schnabel, 1996.

Evans, Christopher and William Herzog. The Faith of 50 Million. Westminster Press, 2002.

Frith, Simon. Performing Rites. Harvard University Press, 1996.

Pinsky, Mark. The Gospel According to the Simpsons. Westminster Press, 2001.

Pountain, Dick and David Robins. Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude. Reaktion, 2000.

Stephens, Mitchell. the rise of the image/the fall of the word. Oxford University Press, 1998.

Twitchell, James. Lead Us Into Temptation. Columbia University Press, 1999.

b. Theology and Culture

Briner, Bob. Roaring Lambs. Zondervan, 1993, 2000.

Clapp, Rodney. Border Crossings: Christian Trespasses on Popular Culture. . . . Brazos, 2000.

Detweiler, Craig and Barry Taylor. The Church of Pop Culture: Finding God in Unexpected Places. Baker, page proofs, 2003.

Godawa, Brian. Hollywood Worldviews. InterVarsity Press, 2002.

Greeley, Andrew. The Catholic Imagination. University of California Press, 2000.

Mouw, Richard. He Shines in All That's Fair: Culture and Common Grace. Eerdmans, 2001.

Romanowski, William. Eyes Wide Open: Looking for God in Popular Culture. Brazos, 2001.

1. Six 1-2 page "fatal flaw" papers on theology and culture books.

2. Two class presentations (possibly in groups).

3. One 4-page response to the Detweiler/Taylor manuscript.

4. (For Ph.D. students) Major research paper on one of pop culture's expressions.

This meets requirements for the M.A. in Theology, Theology and Arts Format; M.A. in Worship, Theology and the Arts; and the Worship, Theology and the Arts concentration in the M.Div.