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on le dit incorrectement ; je deviens proprement le Christ lorsque la parole de Jésus féconde la mienne » (226). Les quatre critères de discernement qui apparaissent en conclusion n'auraient-ils pas pu intervenir plus rapidement pour corriger une lecture éventuellement tronquée des É vangiles ? Ce livre est à lire pour tous les pèlerins en quête de liberté et gageons que le prochain livre de Bergeron approfondira ces critères de discernement pour un monde trop souvent soumis aux seules lois du marché.

The first edition of this book was released in 2000, but in the spinning kaleidoscope of popular culture, eleven years is a very long time. So, this second edition is a much needed update that removes five chapters (on such things as the comic Cathy and the TV show Judge Judy), updates the remaining eleven chapters, and adds five chapters on HBO's True Blood, the ''Buddha Bikini,'' Christian Abstinence groups, social media, and the virtual church in Second Life.Mazur and McCarthy maintain that while the sectors of government and education increasingly suppress religious expression, television, malls, and stadiums have expanded to accommodate a sublimated religious impulse. The lines between religion and culture, insist the authors, ''have blurred more than ever before'' in ways ''that leave scholars dizzy'' (2). This vertigo has its productive side, however, for in the same decade, they note, three academic journals have been created around the subject of religion and popular culture (The Journal of Religion and Film, The Journal of Religion and Theatre, The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture).The focus in this book is not popular religion, but rather popular culture: ''ostensibly secular sites of experience that neither the participant nor the casual observer would identify . . . as religious'' (3). Religious clues are found in the meaning-making moments of everyday life in America-outside of the boundaries of religious institutions. This requires a complicated method: ''the challenge, then, lies not in overcoming the 'otherness' of our subjects of study, but in choreographing the dance that allows us to come into intimate closeness with these subjects and then step back to do critical analysis, then to move in and out again'' (7).The collection of essays from various scholars is strong in its variety, academic value, and its boldness in stretching the category of ''religion'' (e.g. are Jimmy Buffet's Parrotheads really ''religious''?). While the Introduction claims that they are most concerned with what has been called ''popular culture as religion,'' there is a strong thread of chapters on ''religion in popular culture,'' as the sub-title suggests. Christianity and Buddhism are specifically featured, and seeing as this book is a post-9/11 edition, a chapter specifically on Islamic threads woven in popular culture would have been apt (e.g. examining the comedy trio Allah Made Me Funny). A question that lingers through the essays is what relationship the broader term ''sacred'' might have with the more traditional term ''religion,'' especially in light of the ''secular sites'' they want to investigate.

of his own images, he casts a broad net, and he catches a lot of different types of fish. Entire books could be, and have been, written about martyrs or ascetics, about the early Church or the medieval period. Nevertheless, as a survey of the field, or as an exercise in the application of a broad model to particular cases, Kleinberg's book is a successful work of scholarship.The book's subtitle, Saints' Stories and the Western Imagination, points to Kleinberg's narrative approach to his subject. Narrative readings offer a distinct and valuable window into the past, and Kleinberg does an admirable job processing the stories he picks and drawing important conclusions from them. Nevertheless, his narrative approach seems sometimes to ignore textual realities, such as the later redaction of texts by copyists, and the general reliability of ancient texts. This is not to say that Kleinberg himself is not aware of the textuality of the sources he works from. In fact, he does address these issues from time to time, on matters of proliferation of manuscripts as a sign of popularity, and in the case of competing versions of a given story. However, these issues are not addressed in a systematic fashion, and there is a danger, I think, that a reader new to the field would have some trouble, perhaps, navigating the textual reality of hagiography. Kleinberg himself seems to weave a narrative, and while it does not detract from the scholarly value of the book, its arc may overshadow some nuances of the subject.

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.