{"id":466,"date":"2005-07-04T15:42:00","date_gmt":"2005-07-04T15:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=466"},"modified":"2005-07-04T15:42:00","modified_gmt":"2005-07-04T15:42:00","slug":"466","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=466","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Buffy studies<\/strong><\/p>\n

I live beyond the reach of cable television, and mine is one of maybe two houses on this road without a satellite dish. Consequently, I could never have made my mark in the field of “Buffy studies.”<\/a> During its run I saw the program only sporadically when staying in hotels, not enough to really follow the story arcs.<\/p>\n

Buffy the Vampire Slayer<\/em><\/a>, however, drew plenty of attention from those Christians who saw it as luring teens into “the occult,” part of a general viewing-with-alarm of “teen witchcraft”<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But, says Rochester College<\/a> religion professor Gregory Stevenson<\/a>, the show<\/a> was not about “the occult” at all. It actually presents a universe filled with moral discourse and the “occult” elements chiefly function as extended metaphor, for example, “high school is hell (mouth).”<\/p>\n

His book Televised Morality: The Case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer<\/em><\/a> goes so far as to suggest that “Buffy<\/em> employs Christian teachings as a vital piece of its moral foundation.” (Xander as the Christ-figure, for instance.) This “modern fairy tale” does not glorify evil, Stevenson argues, but rather exhorts viewers to make better moral choices. He urges television critiques to move past superificial judgments based upon images of sexuality, violence, and the demonic.<\/p>\n

Maybe I should go rent the DVDs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Buffy studies I live beyond the reach of cable television, and mine is one of maybe two houses on this road without a satellite dish. Consequently, I could never have made my mark in the field of “Buffy studies.” During its run I saw the program only sporadically when staying in hotels, not enough to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6xQTg-466","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1948,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1948","url_meta":{"origin":466,"position":0},"title":"Keeping Up with Buffy Studies","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 27, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Buffy in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching with the Vampire Slayer has now been released by McFarland. Essays describe how Buffy can be used to explain\u2014and encourage further discussion of\u2014television\u2019s narrative complexity, archetypal characters, morality, feminism, identity, ethics, non-verbal communication, film production, media and culture, censorship, and Shakespeare, among other\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"scholarship\"","block_context":{"text":"scholarship","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=scholarship"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":231,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=231","url_meta":{"origin":466,"position":1},"title":"Buffy as spiritual director This\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 28, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Buffy as spiritual director This book had to happen: the only part that surprises me is that I had an image of Jossey-Bass as a fairly staid publisher, based on their display at AAR-SBL meetings. It started out as a joke. Two academic women were laughing over the absurdity of\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7237,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=7237","url_meta":{"origin":466,"position":2},"title":"Call for Papers: The Occult Imagination in Britain","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 19, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Christine Ferguson and Andrew Radford, both of the University of Glasgow, seek contributors for an edited collection, The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875-1947. We seek proposals for an essay collection entitled The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875-1947, to be proposed to Ashgate\u2019s new Among the Victorians and the Modernists series.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"esotericism\"","block_context":{"text":"esotericism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=esotericism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":202,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=202","url_meta":{"origin":466,"position":3},"title":"Somehow I always suspected .\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 6, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Somehow I always suspected . . . The Salt Lake City Weekly has a feature story on how Jay's Journal, that staple of the nice-kid-caught-up-in-the-occult genre, is basically a fake. (Go Ask Alice is another.) Titled Jay's Journal: The shocking diary of a 16-year-old helplessly drawn into a world of\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13015,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=13015","url_meta":{"origin":466,"position":4},"title":"CFP: Design and the Occult","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 20, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"After my various posts on the Pagan-ish presentations by the House of Dior in particular (such as \"The Tarot of Dior\" and \"Dior Dresses the Fair Folk\" and \"I Want to Call Dior's Cruise Collection Pagan-ish Too\") Although study can be a expensive case for previous medicines, there are some\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/dior-2-300x157.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/dior-2-300x157.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/dior-2-300x157.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":826,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=826","url_meta":{"origin":466,"position":5},"title":"The eye of power, bwahahaha","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 22, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"I saw this ancient artificial eye discussed sanely in Archaeology magazine, but then there is the \"soothsayer or priestess\" angle.Trust The Daily Mail for that.Archaeologists said the woman was a female soothsayer or priestess and would have transfixed those around her with her eyeball, making them believe she had occult\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"archaeology\"","block_context":{"text":"archaeology","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=archaeology"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}