ABSTRACT
The serious attention given to ‘popular culture’ in the study of religion and theology in the last two decades has generated a rich range of research-from studies of the lived faith of non-élites, to erudite theological exegeses of media productions, to sophisticated sociological deconstructions of religious practices. It also represents, at its best, diverse examples of the worthiest that an academic life concerned with religion can be: an intellectually serious engagement with everyday life, a deep curiosity and respect for the strangeness of sacrality as lived, an awareness of the necessarily political position of the scholar or the creativity to test religious claims in the domains of the quotidian, the lay, the invisible or-in the case of media-the often too simplistically visible.
