Jottings on science, religion, technology, pop culture and faith from the Antipodes.

Faith & Religion, Pop Culture

Popular culture musings…

In the midst of all of the end of semester madness of assignment and examination marking, meetings and marketing it’s been a week to muse on theology and popular culture.

Firstly, I’ve been finishing off the course outlines and assessment tasks for the course “The Bible and Popular Culture” that I’ll be teaching next semester. It’s a big class being a general education course at the university (an order of magnitude bigger that a regular undergrad theology class), so it’ll be a good chance to teach in a new environment. The class is taken by students from pretty much every faculty, so I won’t assume anything. You can see the description of the course over here.

Then on Wednesday the university hosted its annual STEAM AHEAD day, highlighting opportunities for Maori and Pacific Island school leavers. As part of that I did a presentation on theology using a clips from Bro’ Town, Firefly (the scene in Jaynestown where River and Shepherd Book discuss ‘fixing the Bible’), and a scene from Spider-Man (where the hero has to decide whether to save MJ or the cable car of kids – what would ground the decisions to be made here?).

And then on Thursday, I’ve been asked to write a piece relating popular culture and church – thinking I’ll do something on ‘Four-colour theology’ around comic books and graphic novels. Must be time to find some back issues of some comics while on leave for the next few days.