Page - 145 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

| 145www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 143–148 the physical format of a comic book make, or its thickness, the quality of its paper or colors? Thus, while offering fascinating insights into the large market of religious popular print literature, including developing new genres of African American and Islamic religious literature, the chapter by Jennie Chapman does not reflect in more detail on what the physical materiality of the books means in terms of production, the representation of religious themes, or the religious experiences through reading and sharing. Similarly, the chapter on food by Ben- jamin E. Zeller focuses much attention on mediated food – cooking shows or texts promoting particular diets – with a short section on religious food kitsch (chocolate deities), and discusses how food as a “quasi-religion” creates com- munities and a sense of identity and morality (243), but it does not reflect on the experience of shopping for ingredients, preparing food, its textures, tastes, smell, or colors, practices of sharing food or eating. Nevertheless, the chapters in this section add a wealth of material to the discussion of religion and popular culture. Leonard Norman Primiano’s chapter on kitsch is particularly interesting given that often popular culture is seen as precisely somewhat kitschy and in poor taste, and shares with kitsch the asso- ciation with mass-production and mass-marketing. In fact, as Primiano writes, “kitsch represents human artistry … as an expression of popular culture” (285). Closely linked to modernity both in terms of the appearance of the term (post- 1850s), its imitative aesthetics and the mass production and mass marketing of kitsch objects, kitsch can be seen as a response to the issues of modern life and a means to negotiate them. Kitsch objects are open to a variety of uses, as means of creating religious identity, objects of devotion, pleasant toys or objects of artistic re-signification. When thinking about kitsch and religion, at- tention to the object itself is not enough to understand its religious relevance; instead, the object’s use and the user’s investment in the object are central: “ardent religious commitment might result in the active transformation of cheap or aesthetically suspect objects into cherished instruments of authentic vernacular worship” (305). The chapters collected in the third section focus on “the encounter of the two [religion and popular culture] in defined space, at a definite (if not always defined) time” (313). Briefer than the others, the section includes chapters on the shopping mall, electronic dance music events, the sports stadium and mon- uments of civil religion. Interestingly, there is no chapter on a religious space (e.g. a church, cemetery, or shrine) in which religion and popular culture en- counter each other, even though the integration of popular culture in religious practices is noted elsewhere. Instead, the chapters focus on how apparently secular spaces become significant religious spaces through ritual, changes in the perception of time, or the creation of (new) communities, as Jeffrey Scholes discusses in his chapter on sports. Darryl Caterine’s chapter on monuments and