Page 180 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Religion 163

Titles including “magic” spill from New Age bookshelves, while Xena,
Sabrina and the sisters from Charmed enchant prime-time television
audiences…and children the world over punch computer keys to
undertake vicarious magical quests offered in role-playing games.
(Rountree 2006: 190)

No teenagers approach Neopaganism today without being familiar with
Harry Potter’s magical world. Twenty-first century witches, one of the largest
groups under the Neopagan umbrella, are more likely than their parents’
generation to locate their beliefs and practices in relation to popular films
and television shows than ancient Greek and Celtic mythology.
Teenage Witchcraft, for instance, has been on the rise since the 1990s,
facilitated in part by television series such as “Charmed,” “Sabrina the
Teenage Witch,” and “Buffy” (Berger and Ezzy 2007). Many young Witches
are uncomfortable expressing their religious identities at school and home
because they are harassed for wearing pentacles and black clothes, so they
immerse themselves in online communities. In her doctoral research, Hannah
Saunders surveyed teenage Buffy fans over the Internet and discovered an
interwoven world of books, television, and real-life practice. Besides discussing
Buffy, asking about free Web sites for spells, and reviewing books for each
other, these teenage Witches shared serious health problems and described
ritual experiences, bringing their bodies into the online world (Saunders
2005). Teenage Witches exemplify the ways in which religions dwell in
(to borrow Thomas Tweed’s idea of religions as “dwelling”) electronic as
well as real spaces (Tweed 2006). Neopagans move back and forth between
online and physical selves, popular culture and ancient traditions, fringe and
mainstream, blurring the boundaries of these oppositions.

Altars and shrines as heterotopia writ small

The Internet is the obvious religious frontier of the twenty-first century,
but so are public sites of mourning that increasingly inscribe the landscape
with personal and national narratives of tragedy and loss. Shrines and altars
appear on streets and roadsides and in parks, creating a sacred landscape
unattached to any particular religious tradition (Doss 2006; Santino 2006).
I was enjoying my customary run through the park on September 12, 2007
when I came across a bench covered with flowers and messages remembering
twenty-one-year-old Nicole Miller, who died when the hijacked United
Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. Public expressions
of grief around September 11 are a recent example of how altars and shrines
have become a common American vernacular or, as media scholar Stewart
Hoover puts it, a “new civil religion of commemoration and mourning”