Overview

Sensational Devotion examines contemporary Passion plays, biblical theme parks, Holy Land recreations, creationist museums, and megachurches in order to understand how they serve their evangelical believer-users while also shaping larger cultural and national dialogues. Jill Stevenson explores how performative media support specific theologies and core beliefs by creating sensual, live experiences for those who use them. The book explores evangelical performance across a range of media and sites, including film, television, theater, tourist attractions, museums, and places of worship. Using historical research coupled with firsthand experiences, it critically examines these spaces and events within their specific religious, cultural, and national contexts, while placing them within a long devotional tradition to suggest how they cultivate religious belief by generating vivid, sensual, affectively oriented, and individualized experiences. Stevenson’s analysis builds upon existing work on performance and cognition, as well as theories of affect, as it contributes to existing scholarship on American evangelicalism and evangelical Christian media.

Full Product Details

9780472036516

Table of Contents

Reviews

An engrossing and richly detailed study of the way evangelicalism performs itself—and its adherents—into being by intimately recoding participants’ bodies, feelings, and yearnings. The book deserves a wide and appreciative readership in religious studies, theatre and performance studies, affect studies, and media studies as well.” —Ann Pellegrini, New York University

An engrossing and richly detailed study of the way evangelicalism performs itself-and its adherents-into being by intimately recoding participants' bodies, feelings, and yearnings. The book deserves a wide and appreciative readership in religious studies, theatre and performance studies, affect studies, and media studies as well. -Ann Pellegrini, New York University

[Stevenson] offeres a fascinating, challenging, and necessary survey of how evangelical Christianity performs itself and its theologies in a variety of locales and formats. ... The volume is eminently readable, and Stevenson's style is accessible but still scholarly. This book will be valuable in a variety of disciplines. Choice --K.J. Wetmore Choice (01/01/2013)

Author Information

Jill Stevenson is Associate Professor of Theatre Arts at Marymount Manhattan College.

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