John Walliss

James A. Beckford

While religious forces are powerful in numerous societies, they have little or no significance for wide swaths of public or private life in other places. This book considers the classical roots of ideas about religion that dominated sociological ways of thinking about it for most of the twentieth century. Each chapter offers sound reasons for continuing to find theoretical inspiration and challenge in the sociological classics while also seeking ways of enhancing and extending their relevance to religion today.

Classical and Contemporary Debates

Theorising Religion

James Aston

Representations of apocalyptic themes and motifs in popular culture has a long history, and a number of books and edited collections have examined their influence on popular film and music. Small Screen Revelations shifts the attention to popular television, examining the ways in which contemporary television drama and news draw on both the language and imagery of apocalyptic texts. Essays in the collection examine topics such as the representation of apocalyptic prophecies and prophets in television news and documentaries; how news of natural disasters draws on apocalyptic language to frame the events, and how drama series use, develop and sometimes seek to subvert apocalyptic motifs. Thus, Small Screen Revelations offers a repositioning of the importance of television in representing the apocalypse, while providing a pertinent addition to the examination of how and for what purpose the apocalypse is used in popular culture.

Apocalypse in Contemporary Television

Small Screen Revelations

"This collection addresses the Saw franchise--the highest grossing horror series of all time. The films are often derided as "torture porn." This collection addresses the cultural, religious and philosophical themes that run through the films; how the series explores such issues as freewill and determinism; representations of the body; and a Deleuzian perspective to the franchise"--

Essays on Torture Porn and Post-9/11 Horror

To See the Saw Movies

Kenneth G. C. Newport

The Apocalypse or end times are a recurrent theme within contemporary popular culture. 'The End All Around Us' presents a wide-ranging exploration of the influence of the apocalypse within art, literature, music and film. The essays draw on representations of the apocalypse in heavy metal music, science fiction, disaster movies and anime. The book examines key apocalyptic texts, focusing on their relevance to today. It will be invaluable to all those interested in the religious and cultural impact of apocalyptic thought.

Apocalyptic Texts and Popular Culture

The End All Around Us

This book aims to examine several religious groups holding millenarian or apocalyptic ideologies that have been involved in violent incidents over the last twenty-five years: Peoples Temple, The Branch Davidians, The Order of the Solar Temple, Heaven's Gate, Aum Shinrikyo, and the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God. The work focuses particularly on their respective 'apocalyptic trajectories' - the key recurring issues and social processes that fostered the progressive acceptance of violence within each group's ideology, and ultimately helped to precipitate the use of force against the group's own members or against outsiders.

Millenarianism and Violence in the Contemporary World

Apocalyptic Trajectories

This book is a comparative quantitative analysis of the administration of justice across four English and three Welsh counties between 1760 and 1830. Drawing on a dataset of over 22,000 indictments, the book explores the similarities and differences between how the so-called Bloody Code was administered between, on the one hand, England and Wales, and, on the other, individual English and Welsh counties. The book is structured in two sections that trace the criminal justice process in England and Wales respectively. The first chapter in each section examines the pattern of indictments in the respective counties, and explores the crimes for which men and women were indicted, the verdicts handed down, and the sentences passed. The second chapter then explores patterns of sentences of death, executions and pardons for those capitally convicted of serious crimes against the person and forms of property offences.

John Walliss

Books

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