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The Bible has inspired Western art and literature for centuries, so it is no surprise that Christian iconography, characters, and stories have also appeared in many comic books. Yet the sheer stylistic range of these comics is stunning. They include books from Christian publishers, as well as underground comix with religious themes and a vast array of DC, Marvel, and Dark Horse titles, from Hellboy to Preacher.     Christianity and Comics presents an 80-year history of the various ways that the comics industry has drawn from biblical source material. It explores how some publishers specifically targeted Christian audiences with titles like Catholic Comics, books featuring heroic versions of Oral Roberts and Billy Graham, and special religious-themed editions of Archie. But it also considers how popular mainstream comics like Daredevil, The Sandman, Ghost Rider, and Batman are infused with Christian themes and imagery.    Comics scholar Blair Davis pays special attention to how the medium's unique use of panels, word balloons, captions, and serialized storytelling have provided vehicles for telling familiar biblical tales in new ways. Spanning the Golden Age of comics to the present day, this book charts how comics have both reflected and influenced Americans' changing attitudes towards religion.

In December 2013 several concerned consumers took to social media outlets to try to get Family Christian Stores, a major chain of Christian bookstores, to stop selling Brendan Powell Smith’s books of Bible illustrations done in LEGO blocks. The complaint was that while the books available through the stores,The Brick BibleandThe Brick Bible for Kidsseries, contained no objectionable materials themselves, readily available images on Smith’s related website most certainly did.¹ A quick glance at the shelves of Christian book stores reveals a broad range of Bibles targeting “niche” markets. There are Bibles for hunters, for teens,

In addition to writing numerous journal articles on polymers, he also wrote to teachers, encouraging them to use comic books to interest students in science. While teaching at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio (1976–1985), he authored numerous journal articles (eventually publishing over 1160) and books (eventually publishing over 80). Because of his work through ACS, polymers are now a required subject in all accredited chemistry programs.

The ever-growing fusion of popular culture into belief systems has produced a twenty-first-century rise in commercialized religious and spiritual by-products. Subsequently, faith-based practitioners are also simultaneously consumers of mainstream entertainment. From comics-themed sermons and graphic adaptations of the Bible to the influences of Disney and cultural fairy tales onto occultism, spiritual practices now offer a welcoming gateway for modern generations who feel affection toward pop culture fandoms. This article explores various ways that religion and spirituality have commercialized and celebrated beloved fictional stories—especially in approaches that exemplify contemporary audiences’ deep fascinations toward villains. This exploration spans three topics centered on religious-associated commercialized experiences and products: The evolution of contemporary stained glass from religious architecture to entertaining décor, collaborations between popularized fictional villains and contemporary Christianity, and the rise of mainstreamed occultism through a focus on the exponential expansion of pop culture–themed divination decks during the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, opposing criticisms are presented as juxtapositions to the successful proliferation of secularized spirituality, commercialized consecration, and fusions of faith and fandom.

In recent years, several interesting and complex exegetical works have been produced in the comic book format. The most notable are Robert Crumb’s Illustrated Book of Genesis, and the elaborate Genesis commentary by Dave Sim as part of his long-running independent series Cerebus. Crumb, I argue, uses the comic book format as a means to limit the theological dimension of the text. Sim, by contrast, subordinates the elements of his form to the creation of a highly idiosyncratic exegesis. A close examination of both works charts two radically different and innovative exegetical styles, united by the use of the novel methods of visual storytelling and existence within the context of previous Bible comics. This examination seeks to make these methods accessible to the religious scholar, thus opening the field of graphic exegesis to further examination.

For over a century, the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55) has been at the center of a number of important discussions, concerning not only philosophy and theology, but also, more recently, fields such as social thought, psychology, and contemporary aesthetics, especially literary theory. Despite his relatively short life, Kierkegaard was an extraordinarily prolific writer, as attested to by the 26-volume Princeton University Press edition of all of his published writings. But Kierkegaard left behind nearly as muchunpublishedwriting, most of which consists of what are called his \"journals and notebooks.\" Kierkegaard has long been recognized as one of history's great journal keepers, but only rather small portions of his journals and notebooks are what we usually understand by the term \"diaries.\" By far the greater part of Kierkegaard's journals and notebooks consists of reflections on a myriad of subjects--philosophical, religious, political, personal. Studying his journals and notebooks takes us into his workshop, where we can see his entire universe of thought. We can witness the genesis of his published works, to be sure--but we can also see whole galaxies of concepts, new insights, and fragments, large and small, of partially (or almost entirely) completed but unpublished works.Kierkegaard's Journals and Notebooksenables us to see the thinker in dialogue with his times and with himself. Volume 4 of this 11-volume series includes the first five of Kierkegaard's well-known \"NB\" journals, which contain, in addition to a great many reflections on his own life, a wealth of thoughts on theological matters, as well as on Kierkegaard's times, including political developments and the daily press. Kierkegaard wrote his journals in a two-column format, one for his initial entries and the second for the extensive marginal comments that he added later. This edition of the journals reproduces this format, includes several photographs of original manuscript pages, and contains extensive scholarly commentary on the various entries and on the history of the manuscripts being reproduced.

Recent scholarship has identified multiple levels of interplay between American Jews and sequential art stories (comics). Many comics are now widely understood to be artifacts of the evolving Jewish American experience; this interplay is understood to have grown out of the cultural history, sociology, and social-psychology of the Jews who created, produced, and consumed these comics. But relatively little research has been done on the appropriation and incorporation of Jewish Tradition (Heb.Mesorah) in comics and how this incorporation mirrors the changing relationship of Jewish culture to American (predominantly Protestant) culture. Using textual and visual criticism, supplemented by the selective application of Jewish studies, mythological studies, sociology, and feminist theory, the authors offer insight into an aspect of that appropriation by tracking a single figure from Jewish folklore that comic writers and artists have drawn on, again and again: Lilith, first wife of Adam, hypersexual transgressor, demon mother, infanticide, and evil personified. Lilith's trajectory and revision through pulp visual narratives over the past forty years sees her evolve from the traditional demon harridan into a feminist antihero, a mother seeking redemption from her daughter, and, eventually, an American superhero teammate. Her literary-visual transformations offer a pop culture perspective on Jewish Tradition's evolution from a despised to an accepted element in American culture. Moreover, the continuous hybridization of Lilith's story with Christian motifs, classical mythology, contemporary issues, and American history is a marker of a larger rapid and distinctively American assimilation of Jewish Tradition into the American intellectual and imaginative canon.