Book reviews / Comptes Rendus: God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture, Second Edition Eric Michael Mazur and Kate McCarthy New York: Routledge, 2011. 332 pp.

Abstract

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.