Consuming Religion (Class 200: New Studies in Religion)

What are you drawn to like, to watch, or even to binge? What are you free to consume, and what do you become through consumption? These questions of desire and value, Kathryn Lofton argues, are questions for the study of religion. In eleven essays exploring soap and office cubicles, Britney Spears and the Kardashians, corporate culture and Goldman Sachs, Lofton shows the conceptual levers of religion in thinking about social modes of encounter, use, and longing. Wherever we see people articulate their dreams of and for the world, wherever we see those dreams organized into protocols, images, manuals, and contracts, we glimpse what the word “religion” allows us to describe and understand.
With great style and analytical acumen, Lofton offers the ultimate guide to religion and consumption in our capitalizing times.
 

• Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics
• Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal
• The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West
• Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon
• Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report
• Divine Currency: The Theological Power of Money in the West (Cultural Memory in the Present)
• Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America
• Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject
• The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion
• Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West