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Shopping for Jesus: Faith in Marketing in the USA Dominic James, Ed. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2008.
If scholars of consumer culture have it right, Americans (and, indeed, much of the world) live thoroughly commodified lives in which marketing, branding, shopping, and buying infuse virtually all aspects of our existence. It should come as no surprise, then, that in the United States, which is at once the most commodified and the most religious of western nations, religion has taken on a distinctly commercial character. In Shopping for Jesus: Faith and Marketing in the USA, editor Dominic James brings together an eclectic and interdisciplinary collection of essays that analyze the visual and textual messages of a variety of commercial, primarily Christian, commercial enterprises from children's fiction and religious theme parks, to theater, film, and rock music festivals. As James reminds us in his introductory essay, the coupling of religion and business is nothing new in American culture. Bruce Barton's 1925 bestseller The Man Nobody Knows portrayed Jesus Christ as the world's first (and best) business and marketing executive, and since then, James tells us, "management books have been borrowing the language of religious evangelization...