God and the Idols


Book Description

In 1 Cor 8-10, Paul provides instruction about interactions with idols, and his practical instruction is based on his theology, which was adopted from Hellenistic Judaism and adapted radically in the light of Jesus Christ. Trent A. Rogers shows that understanding Paul's ethical reasoning is helped significantly by understanding how he and his predecessors represent God in their arguments. - back of book.




Idols and Celebrity in Japanese Media Culture


Book Description

This is the most complete and compelling account of idols and celebrity in Japanese media culture to date. Engaging with the study of media, gender and celebrity, and sensitive to history and the contemporary scene, these interdisciplinary essays cover male and female idols, production and consumption, industrial structures and fan movements.




Pop Idols and Pirates


Book Description

The music industry has been waging some very significant battles in recent years, reacting to numerous inter-related crises provoked by globalization, digitalization and the ever more extensive commercialization of public culture. These struggles are viewed by many as central to the survival of the central mediators in the consumption of popular music. These battles are not just against piracy and the sharing of digital song files on the internet. The music industry is also struggling to find ways to compete or integrate with many other forms of entertainment, including films, television programmes, mobile phones, DVDs and video games in an extremely crowded communications environment. The battles currently being fought by the music industry are about nothing less than its continued ability to create and maintain specific kinds of profitable relationships with consumers. This book presents two inter-related cases of crisis and opportunity: the music industry's epic struggle over piracy and the 'Idol' phenomenon. Both are explicit attempts to control and justify the particular ways in which the music industry makes money from popular music through specific kinds of relationships with consumers. The battles over piracy have been fought with a remarkable collection of campaigns consisting of advice, coercion and argument about what is or is not the best way to consume music. From these complicated and often contradictory campaigns we form an unusually clear picture of what many within the music industry imagine their industry to be. In a complementary way, 'Idol' works to demonstrate the joy and pleasure of consuming popular music the 'right' way. By creating a series of intertwined relationships with consumers around multiple sites of consumption, incorporating television, radio, live performance, traditional print media campaigns, text messaging and all manner of internet-based systems of communication and 'fan management,' the producers of 'Idol' present an ideal relationship between musicians and audiences. Instead of focusing on selling CDs, the music industry's digital Achilles' heel, 'Idol' has given the music industry an integrated platform for displaying its expanded palette of products and venues for consumption. When understood in specific relation to the battle against piracy, Fairchild's analysis of 'Idol' and the emerging promotional cultures of the music industry it exhibits shows how multiple sites of consumption, and attempts to mediate and control the circulation of popular music, are being used to combat the foundational challenges facing the music industry.




Male Idols and Branding in Chinese Luxury


Book Description

Challenging the Western view of idols as objects of worship, this book explores the role that male idols play in fashion and cosmetics brand marketing in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau; including the role of the female gaze. It examines idols in the more modern, pan-Asian sense of the word - as objects of social devotion, worshipped by the adoring masses and, in China and Korea, as objects of social and moral uplift. The contemporary idol wields great power - the power to influence taste, and to sell - and Male Idols and Branding in Chinese Luxury focuses on their ability to arouse the consumer appetite to buy. In China, popular culture idols play a vital role in the luxury fashion and cosmetics industries as brand ambassadors and this volume fills a critical gap in the English-language literature on this key element of the marketing industry, bringing together authors from the United States and China, and featuring case studies on idols Wang Yibo and Xiao Zhan. Through considering the subtleties of branding and marketing in China, Korea, and Japan, and the relationship of Chinese idols to fans and consumers in other Asian countries, the authors delve into brand-idol collaborations, particularly through lenses of brand image and toxic fan culture.




Paul Against the Idols


Book Description

The story of Paul's visit to the city of Athens with its speech delivered before the Areopagus council is one of the best-known and most-celebrated passages of the Acts of the Apostles. Being the only complete example of an apostolic address to "pure pagans" recorded, it has consistently attracted the attention of historians, biblical scholars, theologians, missionaries, apologists, artists, and believers over the centuries. Interpretations of the pericope are many and variegated, with opinions ranging from deeming the speech to be a foreign body in the New Testament to acclaiming it as the ideal model of translation of the Christian kerygma into a foreign idiom. At the heart of the debate is whether the various parts of the speech must be understood as Hellenistic or biblical in nature--or both. Paul Against the Idols defends and develops an integrated contextual study of the episode. Reading the story in its Lukan theological, intertextual, narrative, linguistic, and historical context enables an interpretation that accounts for its apparent ambivalence. This book thus contributes to the ongoing hermeneutical and exegetical scholarly discussions surrounding this locus classicus and suggests ways in which it can contribute to a Christian theology of religions and missiology.




From Icons to Idols


Book Description

In 1547, the young King Edward VI issued a series of religious injunctions that were intended to reform the Churches in England. Religious imagery was a tangible and permanent aspect of the landscape, both inside and outside churches. For many people, it was one of the first aspects of the Church to be reformed, and the degree to which it was reformed often was indicative of an individual's or community's theological leanings. Behind this destruction lay a longstanding debate over the nature, purpose, and appropriate uses of images, particularly in relation to worship and devotion. The Reformation lines between icon and idol, however, are much more difficult to identify than any single debate, event, or royal injunction would suggest. FromIcons to Idols tracks the image debate from the perspectives of both Protestants and Catholics across the period of religious change in England from 1525 to 1625. For scholars of the English Reformation, iconoclasm has played a major role in the historiographical disputes over the nature, length, and efficacy of Protestant reform. The fresh perspective of David J. Davis incorporates geography historical use and abuse, popular appeal, size, dimensions and what was represented.




Darna & Other Idols


Book Description

Award-winning Filipino journalist Sheila S. Coronel says, “The engaging profiles in this book provide rare glimpses into the lives of some of the most interesting individuals to have walked the stage of Philippine public life. Whether she's writing about Vilma Santos or Ryan Cayabyab, Rosanna Roces or Rene Saguisag, Marra PL. Lanot tells it like it is. Through these essays, these people come alive—in human dimension, not nobler or more colorful, but as they really are.”




Other Gods and Idols


Book Description

This study questions why the relationship between the worship of other gods and the worship of idols within the Old Testament is difficult to define, acknowledging how various traditions have seen these two issues as synonymous and others have viewed them as separate commandments. Judge argues that there are four factors at play in this diversity. He introduces the first three through an examination of the relationship between the prohibitions listed in the biblical text, and the fourth through a study of the biblical depiction of the war against idols before and after the fall of the Northern Kingdom. Judge argues that texts depicting the era before the fall provide a context in which there are strong grounds to distinguishing the worship of the “wrong gods” and the worship of the right God in the wrong way. However, texts depicting the era after the fall provide a context in which the issues appear to have been fused.




The Idol’S Daughter


Book Description

Christine stood watching her father take his third curtain call to the thunderous cheering of the theater audience. Her father had just become the idol of the London stage. The adulation, however, did not stop him from forsaking the stage and his family when a tragic accident happened on his stage a short time later. Twelve years have passed without a word from her father, and the First World War has begun and is dangerously near. Christine is sent to America to her father. She does not look forward to their reunion. She is abandoned again when she arrives in New York and is denied entry. She finds that he is in Seattle. Fearing being sent back to England, she slips onto a Canadian boat docked at the pier. Christine finally reaches her father, joins the Womens Army Signal Corps, and goes to Europe with the army. At the end of the war, she returns to Atlanta, her husbands home. This is just the beginning of her adventurous life full of romance, mystery, and events that will change her world.