Comics, Culture, and Religion

Reviews / Votes

Kees de Groot's entertaining edited volume explores the complex interplay between religion as portrayed in comics and comics as received and used by religious communities. Seeking to understand the worlds created by comics as potentially religious or spiritual, and as having the capacity to embody ultimate concerns for some readers is an emergent subfield in religious studies, one that reveals the extent to which popular cultural art forms dominate late modernity. * Carole M. Cusack, Professor of Religious Studies, University of Sydney, Australia * Various studies on comics have made progress in popular culture, youth culture, and media studies, but research on them has yet to progress in the sociology of religion and religious studies. For this reason, this book is of outstanding academic significance .... it reveals not only the use of comics by religions and the appropriation of religions in the popular culture of comics, but also the reading and production of comics as practices of "lived religion". * Takahashi Norihito, Professor of Sociology, Toyo University, Japan * This broad collection of essays will move readers to understand religion and comics in more expansive and exciting ways. Finally we have a book that speaks powerfully about religion and comics as culturally intertwined in ways that highlight what religion does with comics and, perhaps more significantly, what comics do with and for religion. * Ken Koltun-Fromm, Professor of Religion, Haverford College, USA * This excellent collection uses "liquid modernity" to name the linkages and fluid boundaries between religion and comics and other spheres from the perspective of culture ... A course on religion and comics could benefit from these essays. The structure of the work and the way these chapters treat lived religion would be helpful for work in popular culture broadly too. * Religious Studies Review *