Sacred Matters : Celebrity Worship, Sexual Ecstasies, the Living Dead, and Other Signs of Religious Life in the United States

A powerful case to embrace a broad view of religion as genuinely religious practices can be found in the unlikeliest of places - science labs, sports games, cinemas and concerts. Religion scholar Laderman shows readers how pilgrimages to Graceland, for example, don't just seem religious, they are religious - enacting traditional, ritualistic patterns of Christianity. In a dramatic reframing of the sacred and the secular, an American landscape blooming with devotions and mythologies is exposed.