Christotainment

For more than two thousand years Christian expansion and proselytizing was couched in terms of 'defending the faith'. Until recently in the United States, much of that defense came in the form of reactions against the 'liberal' influences channeled through big-corporate media such as popular music, Hollywood movies, and network and cable television. But the election of Ronald Reagan as a Hollywood President introduced Christian America to the tools of advertising and multimedia appeals to children and youth to win new believers to God's armies. Christotainment examines how Christian fundamentalism has realigned its armies to combat threats against it by employing the forces it once considered its chief enemies: the entertainment media, including movies, television, music, cartoons, theme parks, video games, and books. Invited contributors discuss the critical theoretical frameworks of top-selling devices within Christian pop culture and the appeal to masses of American souls through the blessed marriage of corporatism and the quest for pleasure.

Key Works in Critical Pedagogy: Joe L. Kincheloe comprises sixteen papers written within a twenty-year period in which Kincheloe inspired legions of educators with his incisive analyses of education. Kincheloe was a prolific thinker and writer who produced an enormous number of books and chapters and journal articles.In a career cut short by his untimely death, Kincheloe led the way with an approach to research and pedagogy that incorporated multiperspectival approaches that examined a wide range of topics including schooling, cultural studies, research bricolage, kinderculture, Christotainment, and capitalism. In these works Kincheloe used accessible, elegantly produced language to capture his emotional yet scholarly ways of engaging with the world. He was a champion of the disenfranchised and his writing consistently examined social life from the perspective of participants who were often treated harshly because of their marginalization. The articles in this book were selected to encompass Kincheloe’s impressive scholarly career and to draw attention to the necessity for educators to take a critical stance with respect to the enactment of education to reproduce disadvantage. Among the theoretical frameworks included in the works are critical pedagogy, research, hermeneutics, phenomenology, cultural studies, and post-formal thought. Key Works in Critical Pedagogy is a comprehensive introduction to the scholarly contributions of one of the foremost educational researchers of our time. The selected chapters and associated scholarly review essays constitute a reference resource for researchers, educators, students of education – and all of those with an interest in adopting a deeper view of ways in which policies and practices shape education and social life to produce privilege and disadvantage simultaneously in ways that are often hidden from view. The critical perspective that permeates these works constitute ways of thinking and being in the world that others can adopt as a framework for analyzing their engagement in education as researchers, teacher educators, policymakers, students, parents of students, and members of the community at large. Responding to each of Kincheloe's chapters is a scholar/teacher who is intimately familiar with the works, theories, and epistemologies of this unique scholar.

"For more than two thousand years Christian expansion and proselytizing was couched in terms of `defending the faith.? Until recently in the United States, much of that defense came in the form of reactions against the `liberal? influences channeled through big-corporate media such as popular music, Hollywood movies, and network and cable television. But the election of Ronald Reagan as a Hollywood President introduced Christian America to the tools of advertising and multimedia appeals to children and youth to win new believers to God?s armies. Christotainment examines how Christian fundamentalism has realigned its armies to combat threats against it by employing the forces it once considered its chief enemies: the entertainment media, including movies, television, music, cartoons, theme parks, video games, and books. Invited contributors discuss the critical theoretical frameworks of top-selling devices within Christian pop culture and the appeal to masses of American souls through the blessed marriage of corporatism and the quest for pleasure."--Provided by publisher.

This edited book explores the under-analyzed significance and function of paranoia as a psychological habitus of the contemporary educational and social moment. The editors and contributors argue that the desire for epistemological truth beyond uncertainty characteristic of paranoia continues to profoundly shape the aesthetic texture and imaginaries of educational thought and practice. Attending to the psychoanalytic, post-psychoanalytic, and critical significance of paranoia as a mode of engaging with the world, this book further inquires into the ways in which paranoia functions to shape the social order and the material desire of subjects operating within it. Furthermore, the book aims to understand how the paranoiac imaginary endemic to contemporary educational thought manifests itself throughout the social field and what issues it makes manifest for teachers, teacher educators, and academics working toward social transformation.

This book provides an interdisciplinary and collaborative anthology that seeks to make a compelling and exciting analysis of contemporary Hollywood film texts (and the larger industry and society to which they are dialectically related) in light of Giroux's ideas about public pedagogy. Foreword by Lawrence Grossberg.

This three-volume collection demonstrates the depth and breadth of evangelical Christians' consumption, critique, and creation of popular culture, and how evangelical Christians are both influenced by—and influence—mainstream popular culture, covering comic books to movies to social media. Evangelical Christians and Popular Culture: Pop Goes the Gospel addresses the full spectrum of evangelical media and popular culture offerings, even delving into lesser-known forms of evangelical popular culture such as comic books, video games, and theme parks. The chapters in this 3-volume work are written by over 50 authors who specialize in fields as diverse as history, theology, music, psychology, journalism, film and television studies, advertising, and public relations. Volume 1 examines film, radio and television, and the Internet; Volume 2 covers literature, music, popular art, and merchandise; and Volume 3 discusses public figures, popular press, places, and events. The work is intended for a scholarly audience but presents material in a student-friendly, accessible manner. Evangelical insiders will receive a fresh look at the wide variety of evangelical popular culture offerings, many of which will be unknown, while non-evangelical readers will benefit from a comprehensive introduction to the subject matter.

While Colin Kaepernick's 2016 protests reignited the debate surrounding athletes and political activism, the relationship between the two is a longstanding tradition. The athletic field has long been a site for protests against racism, hosting key events in the fight for equality, such as legendary African American baseball player Jackie Robinson's 1947 induction into the MLB. Recent protests have expanded to issues like sexism, LGBT rights, and immigration, and have made use of social media and other modern developments. This volume examines the controversies surrounding athlete activism as well as its place in history and contemporary politics.