THEOLOGY 101G The Bible in Popular Culture

Schedule A: Music, Art and Contemporary Issues
Semester Two
City Campus

This course will help you recognise and understand the use of the Bible and biblical themes in contemporary music, film, television, and cultural arts.

By the end of the course, you will know more about the Bible and its key themes, images, metaphors and stories, and be aware of tools that can help you analyse popular culture.

We’ll discuss a variety of popular music, films, and television shows, and study how their creators have consciously or unconsciously employed the Bible as a source of inspiration and challenge.

This course will interest you if you want to explore the ways in which Biblical themes and Biblical characters appear in pop culture, including:

• Music such as Kanye West, Black Eyed Peas, Ben Harper, Brooke Fraser, and Rufus Wainwright.
• TV shows such as bro’Town, The Simpsons, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
• Movies such as The Da Vinci Code and The Passion of Christ.

The class will interest you regardless of your knowledge of the Bible. The course is taught objectively, leaving you free to find your own relationship to the Bible.

After finishing the course, you should be able to:

• Analyse popular culture, particularly as local cultures are affected by globalisation.
• Explain how the Bible plays a part in, impacts on, and critiques popular culture.
• Identify some significant Biblical themes as they appear in film, music, and television shows currently popular in New Zealand.
• Explore how the Bible impacts different cultural and regional contexts and how these contexts impact the reading of Biblical texts.
• Demonstrate how the Bible functions as a cultural resource in a wide variety of contemporary contexts and cultures.
• Present academic work in appropriate form, and demonstrate competence in accessing library and electronic resources that relate to the course content, and are appropriate to New Zealand and Oceania.

• Critical theories of popular culture
• Introduction to the Bible (both testaments)
• How culture shapes the way we read the Bible
• Case studies in misunderstanding the Bible
• Biblical ethics and contemporary ethics
• Prophecy, then and now
• Contemporary messiahs
• Good and evil, death and life
• The end of the world

• Two-hour lecture each Monday, taught by Professor Elaine Wainwright.
• Lectures contain many examples from music, film, art, and television.
• We encourage you to attend a 1-hour tutorial during the week, to engage the course material more deeply, and to prepare the required assignments.

Classes
Mondays, 12noon–2pm
Semester Two

Tutorials
Various times on other weekdays.

• Two pieces of coursework (25% apiece)
• One 2-hour exam at the end of the semester (50%)

• New Revised Standard Version Bible with Apocrypha, Hendrickson, 2005 (required).
• Reading the Bible Again for the First Time by Marcus Borg (required).
• All other course readings will be available on the Library website.