The<i>Journal of Religion and Popular Culture</i>: more than old wine in new bottles
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This essay delineates the history, scope and mandate of the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture (JRPC) in the larger context of Religious Studies. The JRPC produces scholarship on the myriad ways in which religion is presented, produced, studied, interpreted, rationalised, manufactured and disseminated in popular culture. This article explains the journal's distinctive genesis in a Canadian context and provides a succinct analysis of its salient themes over the last two decades, including important trajectories today. It is shown that the JRPC offers more than ‘old wine in new bottles’ both in terms of content (themes) and products (analysis). Popular culture is an indicator of the type of activities that have gained prominence in mass media for conveying religious meaning, purpose and communal experience. The ubiquity of religious themes and experiences in popular culture necessitates their continued academic study. Keywords: popular culturereligious studiesmass mediasocial mediaonline religionreligion and filmreligion and genderreligion and mediaCanada Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of the Government of Canada for its on-going funding support of the JRPC's work. Notes 1The short film entitled “Beatles 3000” imagines reconstructing the chronology of the pop band the ‘Beatles’ in the far-off future after a hypothetical catastrophe affected humanity's knowledge archives. The film humourously depicts the challenges of reconstructing the historicity of the Beatles from disparate sources a thousand years after the Beatles’ alleged existence. The film offers a brilliant analogy to the corresponding challenges facing scholars of the biblical cannon. 2In light of the troubled history of Jewish-Catholic relations, it is significant that the first Twitter messages received by Pope Benedict XVI included a greeting from a Jewish head of state, Israeli President Shimon Peres: ‘Your holiness, welcome to Twitter. Our relations with the Vatican are at their best & can form a basis to further peace everywhere’ (Pullella Citation2012). 3The JRF was first published in 1997. See Blizek, Desmarais and Burke Citation2011.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it