Download or read book God Mocks written by Terry Lindvall and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2015-11-13 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2016 Religious Communication Association Book of the Year Award In God Mocks, Terry Lindvall ventures into the muddy and dangerous realm of religious satire, chronicling its evolution from the biblical wit and humor of the Hebrew prophets through the Roman Era and the Middle Ages all the way up to the present. He takes the reader on a journey through the work of Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales, Cervantes, Jonathan Swift, and Mark Twain, and ending with the mediated entertainment of modern wags like Stephen Colbert. Lindvall finds that there is a method to the madness of these mockers: true satire, he argues, is at its heart moral outrage expressed in laughter. But there are remarkable differences in how these religious satirists express their outrage.The changing costumes of religious satirists fit their times. The earthy coarse language of Martin Luther and Sir Thomas More during the carnival spirit of the late medieval period was refined with the enlightened wit of Alexander Pope. The sacrilege of Monty Python does not translate well to the ironic voices of Soren Kierkegaard. The religious satirist does not even need to be part of the community of faith. All he needs is an eye and ear for the folly and chicanery of religious poseurs. To follow the paths of the satirist, writes Lindvall, is to encounter the odd and peculiar treasures who are God’s mouthpieces. In God Mocks, he offers an engaging look at their religious use of humor toward moral ends.
Download or read book Religious Satire in the Era of New Atheism written by Jerry C. Jaffe and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-07-18 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious Satire in the Era of New Atheism presents a contemporary account of religious satire as evidenced by the modern art of stand-up comedy. Focused on the context of the post-9/11 American culture phenomenon, sometimes referred to as the New Atheism – as embodied by public intellectuals such as Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins – it documents the rise of comedic satire in relation to evangelical beliefs and religious dogma. Drawing on the author’s own experience of stand-up performance, it examines the comedy of figures such as Mark Maron, Bill Maher, and Ricky Gervais and presents material from interviews with comedians including Lewis Black, John Fugelsang, and Leigh Ann Lord to provide unique insights into some of the issues and definitions surrounding satire. With attention to the demonstrable rise in religious satire following the events of September 11, 2001, the author considers the clear link between this increase and the New Atheist movement, exploring shared themes and presence at specific events, such that stand-up comedy represents the Avant Garde of the New Atheists.
Download or read book Christianity Made Me Talk Like an Idiot written by Seth Andrews and published by Outskirts Press. This book was released on 2022-01-24 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seth Andrews wasn't an idiot during his thirty years as an evangelical Christian. He wasn't unintelligent, nor did his IQ shift when he ultimately left religion entirely. He considered himself thoughtful, moral, reasonable, and at least as smart as the average person. In other words, he wasn't an idiot. Yet strangely, he often sounded like one. In any other context, Christians would likely smirk, scoff, or recoil at many of their "normal" beliefs and practices: reenacted Easter crucifixions, eating monthly communion "flesh," singing hymns about being washed in blood, and the embrace of a Bible containing scripture verses about golden hemorrhoids, apocalypse dragons, and human sacrifice, So what gives? Are these notions embraced only because they're familiar? Do they make any sense? And do they cause otherwise reasonable people to sound like idiots? Seth Andrews admits that, for himself, the answer was a definite yes. For everyone else? Read the book and decide.
Download or read book Drawn to the Gods written by David Feltmate and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2017-04-11 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new world of religious satire illuminated through the layers of religion and humor that make up the The Simpsons, South Park and Family Guy. Drawing on the worldviews put forth by three wildly popular animated shows – The Simpsons, South Park, and Family Guy– David Feltmate demonstrates how ideas about religion’s proper place in American society are communicated through comedy. The book includes discussion of a wide range of American religions, including Protestant and Catholic Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Native American Religions, New Religious Movements, “Spirituality,” Hinduism, and Atheism. Along the way, readers are shown that jokes about religion are influential tools for teaching viewers how to interpret and judge religious people and institutions. Feltmate, develops a picture of how each show understands and communicates what constitutes good religious practice as well as which traditions they seek to exclude on the basis of race and ethnicity, stupidity, or danger. From Homer Simpson’s spiritual journey during a chili-pepper induced hallucination to South Park’s boxing match between Jesus and Satan to Peter Griffin’s worship of the Fonz, each show uses humor to convey a broader commentary about the role of religion in public life. Through this examination, an understanding of what it means to each program to be a good religious American becomes clear. Drawn to the Gods is a book that both fans and scholars will enjoy as they expose the significance of religious satire in these iconic television programs.
Download or read book All Things Vain written by Robert A. Kantra and published by Penn State University Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion and satire can be incompatible, even opposed, but they can also join to produce great art. So argues this wide-ranging book, which seeks to identify the essence of religious satire, beginning with the art of such Renaissance figures as Erasmus and Dürer and concluding with such modern writers as Beckett, Eliot, and Waugh. Modern painters and sculptors, though not often concerned with religious satire, may employ its themes--as indeed may practitioners of the "new science" flourishing since Newton. The theme of religious satire, in Kantra's words, is "man's encroachment on the divine--his effort to play God, in whole or in part--whether under the banner of religion or of humanity." Heroic art has the same subject but a different attitude: it celebrates man's pretensions to divinity, whereas religious satire mocks them--sometimes harshly, sometimes gently. "If heroic art is ennobling, satiric art is humbling." Comedy sometimes may be found in satiric works, tragedy never, and tragicomedy always. The book starts with a brief examination of medieval religious satire: the rough shepherds in mystery plays, the lusty clerics in Chaucer, the roof bosses of Gluttony, Lying, and the Devil swallowing Judas Iscariot in Southwark Cathedral. The Renaissance was a golden era for the genre. Dürer engraved Saint Jerome (who wrote satirical letters), his halo off center, in what Kenneth Clark calls "a typically Erasmian room" with the lion and the little dog in the foreground, "sharing a conspicuously self-satisfied contentment." Yet Dürer, according to Erwin Panofsky, "failed when confronted with the small, quiet, supremely ironic face of Erasmus of Rotterdam." But what artist could capture the author of The Praise Folly, who saw self-styled sapient humans as "a swarm of flies and gnatss . . . laying traps for one another?" Kantra contends that the English--Elizabethans, Metaphysicals, Augustans, Victorians, and moderns --have always mixed satire with comedy and tragedy. Donne wrote in Satyre III that "our Mistresse faire religion," can look like "neare twin" to a strumpet. Satire, Milton said, "was born out of a Tragedy, so ought to resemble his parentage." Consider his Satan and his fallen legions. Chesterton and Belloc lampooned "essentially modern men" who reject magic and religion. Today religious satire is more alive than ever--among both churched writers such as Eliot, Waugh, or Dorothy Sayers, and the unchurched such as Shaw, Joyce, and Beckett --in works that pull down the vanity of modern man's once-proud claim to have conquered nature.
Download or read book A Mirror for Fools written by Terry Lindvall and published by . This book was released on 2015-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our purpose is threefold: first, to visually introduce an historical character who contributed to the practice of humor and satire in cartoon form. Second, we offer a bit of doggerel to tease some aspect of the person. Third, we settle down and provide a bit of context for the illustration and the verse. Like Horace's dulce et utile, we hope to teach and delight simultaneously. A mix of verse and illustration and commentary is meant to send readers back to the sources, to the rich, varied tradition of wit and humor being used for moral and spiritual reform. It then serves as that mirror that shows the reader his or her face, even as the authors recognize the marks of folly in their own.
Download or read book The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster written by Bobby Henderson and published by Villard. This book was released on 2010-04-07 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can I get a “ramen” from the congregation?! Behold the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM), today’s fastest growing carbohydrate-based religion. According to church founder Bobby Henderson, the universe and all life within it were created by a mystical and divine being: the Flying Spaghetti Monster. What drives the FSM’ s devout followers, a.k.a. Pastafarians? Some say it’s the assuring touch from the FSM’s “noodly appendage.” Then there are those who love the worship service, which is conducted in pirate talk and attended by congregants in dashing buccaneer garb. Still others are drawn to the Church’s flimsy moral standards, religious holidays every Friday, or the fact that Pastafarian heaven is way cooler: Does your heaven have a Stripper Factory and a Beer Volcano? Intelligent Design has finally met its match—and it has nothing to do with apes or the Olive Garden of Eden. Within these pages, Bobby Henderson outlines the true facts– dispelling such malicious myths as evolution (“only a theory”), science (“only a lot of theories”), and whether we’re really descended from apes (fact: Humans share 95 percent of their DNA with chimpanzees, but they share 99.9 percent with pirates!) See what impressively credentialed top scientists have to say: “If Intelligent Design is taught in schools, equal time should be given to the FSM theory and the non-FSM theory.” –Professor Douglas Shaw, Ph.D. “Do not be hypocritical. Allow equal time for other alternative ‘theories’ like FSMism, which is by far the tastier choice.” –J. Simon, Ph.D. “In my scientific opinion, when comparing the two theories, FSM theory seems to be more valid than classic ID theory.” –Afshin Beheshti, Ph.D. Read the book and decide for yourself!
Download or read book Milton and Religious Controversy written by John N. King and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-06-22 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious satire and polemic constitute an elusive presence in Paradise Lost. John N. King shows how Milton's poem takes on new meaning when understood as part of a strategy of protest against ecclesiastical formalism and clericalism. The experience of Adam and Eve before the Fall recalls many Puritan devotional habits. After the Fall, they are prone to 'idolatrous' ritual and ceremony that anticipate the religious 'error' of Milton's own age. Vituperative sermons, broadsides and pamphlets, notably Milton's own tracts, afford a valuable context for recovering the poem's engagement with the violent history of the Civil Wars, Commonwealth and Restoration, while contemporary visual satires help to clarify Miltonic practice. Eighteenth-century critics who attacked breaches of decorum and sublimity in Paradise Lost alternately deplored and ignored a literary and polemical tradition deployed by Milton's contemporaries. This important study, first published in 2000, sheds light on Milton's epic and its literary and religious contexts.
Download or read book Foundations for Moral Relativism written by J. David Velleman and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2015-11-23 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new edition of Foundations for Moral Relativism a distinguished moral philosopher tames a bugbear of current debate about cultural difference. J. David Velleman shows that different communities can indeed be subject to incompatible moralities, because their local mores are rationally binding. At the same time, he explains why the mores of different communities, even when incompatible, are still variations on the same moral themes. The book thus maps out a universe of many moral worlds without, as Velleman puts it, "moral black holes”. The six self-standing chapters discuss such diverse topics as online avatars and virtual worlds, lying in Russian and truth-telling in Quechua, the pleasure of solitude and the fear of absurdity. Accessibly written, this book presupposes no prior training in philosophy.
Download or read book An Outlaw Named Jesus written by Thaddeus Blake and published by FriesenPress. This book was released on 2021-02-17 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thought-provoking collection takes aim at the dark, irrational, immoral, and dangerous elements of religion; Televangelists preying on elderly victims, extant misogyny and witch-burning practices, racism, slavery and violence defended in holy books, wars justified, soldiers recruited in the name of “God,” pedophile priests and assaults on free expression. Sometimes satirical and humorous, sometimes tragic and impassioned, these poems are for anyone with a dark sense of humour, a belief in free expression, or simply a love of poetry. In the same way that religion often uses guilt, fear, and shame to restrain the mind against any criticism, this collection uses humour and pathos to free it up and elicit passion and laughter in those who find beauty and humour in the irreverent.
Download or read book The Other End of the Egg written by Martin Kallich and published by New York University Press. This book was released on 1970 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Power of Laughter and Satire in Early Modern Britain written by Mark Knights and published by Boydell Press is. This book was released on 2017 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading scholars show how laughter and satire in early modern Britain functioned in a variety of contexts both to affirm communal boundaries and to undermine them.
Download or read book An Act of God written by David Javerbaum and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-05-05 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ***An Act of God (previously published as The Last Testament: A Memoir) is now a major Broadway show starring Jim Parsons (The Big Bang Theory) and directed by Joe Mantello (Wicked)*** Over the course of his long and distinguished career, God has literally seen it all. And not just seen. In fact, the multitalented deity has played a pivotal role in many major events, including the Creation of the universe, the entirety of world history, and the successful transitioning of American Idol into the post–Simon Cowell era. Sometimes preachy, sometimes holier-than-thou, but always lively, An Act of God is the ultimate celebrity autobiography.
Download or read book The Sincere Huron Pupil of Nature written by Voltaire and published by Musaicum Books. This book was released on 2017-06-28 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Huron, or originally called L'Ingénu is a satirical novel and it tells the story of a Huron called "Child of Nature" who, after having crossed the Atlantic to England, crosses into Brittany, France in the 1690s. Upon arrival, a prior notices depictions of his brother and sister-in-law, whom they deduce to be the Huron's parents - making him French. Having grown up outside of European culture, he sees the world in a more 'natural' way, causing him to interpret things directly, unaware of what is customary, leading to comic misinterpretations. After reading the Bible, he feels he should be circumcised and calls upon a surgeon to perform the operation (which is stopped through the intervention of his 'family'). After his first confession, he tries to force the priest to confess as well - interpreting a biblical verse to mean confessions must be made mutually and not exempting the clergy. Not expecting to be baptized in a church, they find the Child of Nature waiting in a stream, as baptisms are depicted in the Bible. The story satirizes religious doctrine, government corruption, and the folly and injustices of French society. François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), known by his nom de plume Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and separation of church and state. As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma, and the French institutions of his day.
Download or read book Religious Satire in the Era of New Atheism written by Jerry C. Jaffe and published by . This book was released on 2024 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Religious Satire in the Era of New Atheism presents a contemporary account of religious satire as evidenced by the modern art of stand-up comedy"--
Download or read book Graphic Satire and Religious Change written by Joke Spaans and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-06-22 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on a small corpus of enigmatic satirical prints, so far ignored by art historians and historians of religion, this book traces covert debates on the shortcomings of early modern religious culture, and directions for reform, in the Dutch Republic.
Download or read book Religion and Media in America written by Anthony Hatcher and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2018-05-25 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering topics ranging from the Moral Monday movement to Christian films and performers, Religion and Media in America is a qualitative study of the ways in which religion has been woven into American popular and civic culture. This book explores how Christianity both adapts to and is affected by new media forms. Its six chapters address religious activism; government imposition of religiosity into secular culture; religious entertainment; Bible translations marketed as consumer goods; and how religious satire comes from both religious and secular sources. Recommended for scholars and students interested in media studies, film studies, religion, communication, American history, American studies, political science, and popular culture.
