By Princess O’Nika Auguste During the holiday season, the pull of childhood nostalgia often leads me back to the familiar landscapes of my past. This means I return to the adventures of the mythological universe of Xena: The Warrior Princess and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. In my rewatch, I find myself drawn more to Hercules…
Author: matthewbrake84
Share Your Experience with Religion and Works of Fantasy! (Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter)
Researchers at the University of Maine and Kingswood University are conducting a brief survey to understand Christians’ experiences with religion and works of fantasy. If you are 18 or older, grew up Christian, and were ever told by an authority figure like a parent, grandparent, youth leader, or religious official to avoid reading or watching what…
Overshadowed: Re-Examining Consent in Divine “Virgin Birth” Narratives from Luke to Xena
By Princess O’Nika Auguste The Christmas season centres the story of the Virgin Mary, a narrative of divine mystery and grace. Yet when we examine this sacred trope across scripture and popular culture, a troubling and consistent question emerges: what happens when a “virgin birth” is not a chosen vocation but a divine imposition? This foundational…
Extended Call for Papers: Religion and Peak TV
Extended Call for Papers: Religion and Peak TV Volume Editor: George Tsakiridis, PhD Abstract and CV Due: November 30, 2025 Initial Final Paper Due: June 30, 2026 Around the late 1990s/early 2000s a revolution in television began to take place, with HBO making waves with shows like The Sopranos and Deadwood, The Wire, and Entourage,…
Extended Call for Papers: Consequential Play – Theology, Video Games, & Culture
CFP: Consequential Play – Theology, Religion and Video Games Volume Editor: Trevor B. Williams Abstract + CV due: December 15, 2025 Video games have become a formative aspect of popular culture because they provide special opportunities for interactive storytelling, intense competition, leisure, and even artistic expression. Depending on how one defines the term “video games,”…
Call for Papers: Religion in Jack Kirby’s Fourth World and Beyond
Religion in Jack Kirby’s Fourth World and Beyond Editor: Matthew Brake Jack Kirby needs no introduction. He was one of the most prolific and creative figures in the history of modern mainstream superhero comics and few others have done more to influence the superhero genre in various media across decades. Plenty of ink has been…
Call for Papers: Religion and Peak TV
Volume Editor: George Tsakiridis, PhD Abstract and CV Due: September 30, 2025 Initial Final Paper Due: June 30, 2026 Around the late 1990s/early 2000s a revolution in television began to take place, with HBO making waves with shows like The Sopranos and Deadwood, The Wire, and Entourage, to mention a few. This wave turned into…
Call for Papers: Religion and AI in Science Fiction and Horror
Book Title: A (Holy?) Ghost in the Machine: Religion and Artificial Intelligence in Science-Fiction and Horror Editor: Gregory Stevenson, York University The genres of Science-Fiction and Horror have always been somewhat ahead of the curve in envisioning the possibilities and dangers of technology. With the rapidly increasing advancements in the field of artificial intelligence, those…
Call for Papers: Religious Emergence and The Sacred in Legends of Zelda
Volume Editor: Michael Barros This book will explore how religion and the sacred emerge from within the structure and narrative of The Legend of Zelda series, one of the most influential and enduring franchises in video game history. Zelda has greatly impacted multiple generations of players, and has an extremely loyal and dedicated fanbase. Rather than primarily comparing Zelda to existing…
Blue Lights, Insurmountable Debt, and the Affordances of its Erasure
By Justin Martin In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), anthropologist David Graeber and Archeologist David Wengrow set out to offer a new way of thinking about the human origins of social complexity that is more in line with relatively recent scholarship and the preponderance of evidence as a whole. While…
Pop Culture and Theology 