Authentic
Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture.
Chidester, David.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 294+xii pp. $50.00 US (cloth),
ISBN 978-0-520-24279-1; $21.95 US
(paperback), ISBN 0-520-24280-7.
[1] In Authentic Fakes, David Chidester explains
how “the traces of transcendence, the
sacred, and the ultimate” saturate American popular
culture (10). Far from flighty or irrelevant, the
author posits that popular culture “has a lot to do
with how Americans in the
United States think about America” (29). “America”
casts a large shadow in this book, extending beyond
territorial boundaries and into the global theatre. An
American-born professor of comparative religion at the
University of Cape Town in South Africa, Chidester is
in a unique position to
witness America’s widespread influence. As a result,
he delivers a captivating series of dispatches from popular
culture, each revealing how religion is at work in some
unlikely places
throughout the world. Both
scholars of religion and popular culture and theorists
of religion should read
this book. At its core, this
volume is a penetrating study of religion, its meanings, locations, practices, and importance.
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http://www.usask.ca/relst/jrpc/br15-authenticfakes.html
