Page - 147 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

| 147www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 143–148 ter on Roman Catholicism, with sections on the representation of Catholic fig- ures in film, on the identity-shaping impact of the Notre Dame football team, on festivals or festivity as markers of Catholic presence in popular culture, and on the influence of the Catholic imagination on contemporary music. Mostly using a historical approach that traces the representation of a reli- gious tradition across time (and, sometimes, across different media), the chap- ters in this section offer interesting insights into the changes of representations and the ways in which traditions align with particular forms of popular culture, such as contemporary Paganism and the fantasy genre. Discussions of traditions that are “other” to the American context, such as Islam or Judaism, note how representations have shifted from simplistic good/bad schemata to more dif- ferentiated representations, with the goal described as “normalization”, that is, the representation of characters as complex, multifaceted beings, defined not exclusively by their religious identity. Lynita K. Newswander, Chad B. Newswan- der, and Lee Trepanier’s chapter on Mormonism traces the earlier contradictory media representation of a marginalized and often discriminated religious com- munity as paradigmatic of American values such as family and honest and hard work. More recent media representations of Mormons, both in TV reality shows and in the Mormons’ own media campaigns, contribute to a change in the pub- lic perception of Mormons “from traditional, staid, and white to pluralistic, dy- namic, and multi-ethnic” (514), representing diverse sets of values ranging from more conservative to more progressive. With an interesting twist to this section’s overall interest, Clive Marsh’s chap- ter on Protestantism notes that this religious tradition is conspicuously absent from popular media, at least as far as explicit references are concerned. Mostly, Protestant identity is assumed if no other religious affiliation is stated – a move furthered by Protestant resistance to a priestly order and its self-understanding as the religion of the everyday, in addition to the influence that Protestantism has had in shaping (secular) culture. Marsh also notes that where Protestant- ism is made explicit, denominational differences are usually downplayed to represent a kind of “generic” Protestantism. The recent re-emergence of more specifically Protestant portrayals (for example of denominationally identified clergy) might be due, Marsh speculates, to the decline of Protestant influence on popular culture and a more positive attitude towards specific identities in postmodernity. While the volume covers vastly different media, spaces and religious tradi- tions, at least two issues appear as central across the different chapters, namely the blurring of boundaries between sacred and profane in encounters between religion and popular culture, and the problem of definitions and how they con- struct the material with which one engages. Both aspects make the study of religion and popular culture more complex, yet also, I would argue, more fruit-