God and Cultural Studies

Greetings, Cultstud folks,

Having completed my M.A. thesis ("Towards a Dialogic 
Understanding of Print Media Stories About Black/White 
Interracial Families,") I can now turn my sights to other 
projects.  I made an inquiry to this list about this some 
months ago, but wasn't able to sustain it.  I'm interested in 
whether anyone has done cultural studies work from a 
religious perspective.  By this I mean, has anyone critically 
examined culture by combining any of the methods employed in 
cultural studies with any kind of religious or spiritual 
beliefs?

 This is a separate, for now, question from how cultural 
studies examines religion (although that's also an 
interesting question).  It doesn't matter which religious or 
spiritual tradition (mine is Baha'i), it could be Christian, 
Sikh, Muslim, Buddhist, Pagan, whatever.  I'm interested in 
how the researcher(s) combined her/his/their beliefs with 
theories and methods from CS.  It seems to me that 
religious/spiritual believers would be among the harshest 
critics of many aspects of contemporary culture and would be 
deeply disturbed by the increasing commodification of all 
aspects of life by global capital these days.

In my brief (about 2.5 years) acquaintance with CS, I've 
noticed that CS shares with many other 
fields/practices/disciplines/communities a thoroughly secular 
viewpoint, in which questions about any kind of "higher 
power" are very rarely asked.  Most cultural studies 
discourses rule out such questions.  I'd like to rule them 
back in, or at least make room for religious and spiritual 
perspectives into Cultural Studies, which I take to be "an 
expanding space for sustained, rigorous and self-reflexive 
empircal research into the massive, power-laden complexity of 
contemporary culture," (Nick Couldy, "Inside Culture: Re-
imagining the method of Cultural Studies," Sage, 2000, p. 1).

So, if anyone knows of any work along the lines described 
above, I'd be interested in hearing about it, on or off 
list.  A rigorous and self-reflexive debate about religion 
and CS might also be interesting.  vk

Victor Kulkosky
(706) 227-9800
M.A., 2003
vmark@xxxxxxx

"Man is free, and can therefore violate any regulating norms that can be thrust 
upon him."  M.M. Bakhtin

"These fruitless strifes, these ruinous wars, shall pass away, and the Most 
Great Peace shall come."  Baha'u'llah