Description
Take a pilgrimage through Disney's parks, films, and characters, and discover the spiritual world at work inside its most enduring stories
Disney and Religion: A Small Spiritual World, After All is the first edited volume to examine Disney's theme parks and films using the tools of religious studies. From Hong Kong Disneyland to Walt Disney’s birthplace in Chicago, the scholars in this volume journey across the globe drawing insights from spiritual figures as diverse as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and Augustine of Hippo. This book explores questions of devotion, ritual, pilgrimage, and meaning-making at the border where lived religion meets consumer culture:
- Can fireworks shows be sites of conversion?
- Does drinking "around the world" at Epcot reframe how we sample world religions?
- Is a return trip to a Disney Vacation Club resort a pilgrimage?
- What do Disney films borrow from theology, myth, and moral instruction?
- Can admiration and critique of the Magic Kingdom coexist in a single response?
Written by scholars who have brought Disney into their own undergraduate classrooms, this volume pairs pedagogical insight with theoretical framing for courses in religious studies, religion and popular culture, and American studies, and for readers in sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, and Disney studies. Whether you're a Disney fan or a Disney skeptic, Disney and Religion opens a whole new world of frameworks for understanding the spiritual dimensions of the Disney phenomenon.
Table of Contents
Contributors vii
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Jodi Eichler-Levine
Part 1 The Happiest Cruise That Ever Sailed: Travel and Traditions 7
1 Temples, Towers, and Tequila: Consuming World Religions at EPCOT's World Showcase 9
Joshua T. Parks
2 Is (Hong Kong) Disney a Religion? 29
Kathryn Gin Lum
Part 2 Magic Mirror: Play, Mythmaking, and Homes 51
3 The Play's the Thing: Childhood and Play as Spiritual Practice in Bluey 53
Laura Yares
4 The Laughing Place: Race and American Mythmaking in Disney's Bayou Country 71
Che Pieper
5 Welcome "Home": The Role of Nostalgia and the Complexities of the Local in the Disney Vacation Club 85
Adrienne Krone
Part 3 Now Make a Wish, and Take a Bite: Ritual Studies 101
6 "If You Can Dream It, You Can Do It": Disney Castle Fireworks and American New Thought (Anew) 103
Jill Peterfeso
7 Animism in Disney Theme Parks 121
Jennifer E. Porter
8 Disney Fan Conventions and the Ritual Remaking of Community 143
Jodi Eichler-Levine
Part 4 To All Our Company: Fandom and Communitas 159
9 How Disney Roleplay Groups Imagined Other Worlds (and Ours) 161
Karis Haewon Ryu
10 Happily Ever Afterlife: Walt Disney as the Ultimate High Priest in His Creative "Promised Land" 175
Christopher W. Tremblay
Index 197
