Honorable Mention for the 2022 Elli Köngäs-Maranda Prize awarded by the Women's Section of the American Folklore Society Goddess characters are revered as feminist heroes in the popular media of many cultures. However, these goddess characters often prove to be less promising and more regressive than most people initially perceive. Goddesses in film, television, and fiction project worldviews and messages that reflect mostly patriarchal culture (included essentialized gender assumptions), in contrast to the feminist, empowering levels many fans and critics observe. Building on critiques of other skeptical scholars, this feminist, folkloristic approach deepens how our remythologizing of the ancient past reflects a contemporary worldview and rhetoric. Structures of contemporary goddess myths often fit typical extremes as either vilified, destructive, dark, and chaotic (typical in film or television); or romanticized, positive, even utopian (typical in women’s speculative fiction). This goddess spectrum persistently essentializes gender, stereotyping women as emotional, intuitive, sexual, motherly beings (good or bad), precluded from complex potential and fuller natures. Within apparent good-over-evil, pop-culture narrative frames, these goddesses all suffer significantly. However, a few recent intersectional writers, like N. K. Jemisin, break through these dark reflections of contemporary power dynamics to offer complex characters who evince “hopepunk.” They resist typical simplified, reductionist absolutes to offer messages that resonate with potential for today’s world. Mythic narratives featuring goddesses often do, but need not, serve merely as ideological mirrors of our culture’s still problematically reductionist approach to women and all humanity.

This interdisciplinary collection brings together world leaders in Gothic Studies, offering dynamic new readings on popular Gothic cultural productions from the last decade. Topics covered include, but are not limited to: contemporary High Street Goth/ic fashion, Gothic performance and art festivals, Gothic popular fiction from Twilight to Shadow of the Wind, Goth/ic popular music, Goth/ic on TV and film, new trends like Steampunk, well-known icons Batman and Lady Gaga, and theorizations of popular Gothic monsters (from zombies and vampires to werewolves and ghosts) in an age of terror/ism.

Though nearly everyone is familiar with such great mythological figures as Hercules, Icarus, and Medusa, one may wonder what relevance these ancient characters, and their stories, hold for modern readers. This unique reference book brings mythology to life for students by exploring the connections between ancient myths and contemporary culture. An introductory essay sets the tone with its overview of the myriad areas of human endeavors—including the arts, science, psychology, language and literature, consumer products, and other aspects of popular culture—that mythology has influenced. The user-friendly volume is comprised of 50 narrative essays that trace the cultural connections and offer a lively retelling of each myth. For example, readers will discover the derivation of Freudian psychoanalysis from the myth of Oedipus, and fans of popular film and fiction may be surprised to learn the mythological inspirations for works like Beauty and the Beast, The Matrix, or Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead. This engrossing book is enhanced with 25 original illustrations. Five fact-filled appendices offer glossaries and interesting mythological etymologies of commonplace words in nature, science, and everyday consumer products like Nike shoes and Olympus cameras. Whether for research or pure enjoyment, this accessible and informative book reveals the many unrecognized references to mythology that impact our lives.

This book provides a detailed exploration of the spiritual and religious contexts and subtexts of contemporary fiction.

Humans are created in the image of God, yet by choosing to rebel against God we become unfaithful bearers of his image. But Jesus, who is the image of God, restores the divine image in us. At the intersection of theology and culture, these essays offer a unified vision of what it means to be truly human and created in the divine image in the world today.

Many female figures in recent fiction, film, and television embody the Artemis archetype, modeled on the Greco-Roman goddess of the hunt. These characters are often identified as heroines and recognized as powerful and progressive pop icons. Some fit the image of the tough, resourceful female in a science fiction or fantasy setting, while others are more relatable, inhabiting a possible future, a recent past, or a very real present. Examining both iconic and lesser-known works, this collection of new essays analyzes the independent and capable female figure as an ideal representation of women in popular culture.

The History of the Kingdom of God I: Creation to Parousia is a revision by Sofia Cavalletti of her earlier work, History's Golden Thread, a core text in the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. Another core text, Living Liturgy, has also been revised and will be the second volume, The History of the Kingdom of God II: Liturgy and the Building of the Kingdom. Together, these two volumes offer the reader insight into Scripture and Liturgy as the means to understand God's plan of salvation history, from the creation of the world, through redemption by the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus, to its culmination in the Parousia, when God will be all in all. While this first volume is essential reading for all catechists of the Good Shepherd, anyone who studies the Bible and who seeks to understand God's revelation through sacred history will be enlightened and inspired by Cavalletti's insights and scholarship. According to Rebekah Rojcewicz, the translator of both the original volume and this revision, and also a catechist herself, this revised edition is "even more essential, … a fruit of Cavalletti's more than fifty years of patient observation of and work with children in the atrium…. Essentiality is one of the strongest spiritual characteristics of even the youngest children, and it is also one of the most severe disciplines for most adults. In this book, the less is truly more, for it enables us to more readily detect the "golden thread," the plan of God that binds together the whole history of salvation.