Abstract
[Excerpt] As one might expect from a broadly interdisciplinary edited work, there is a wide range of topical, temporal, and theoretical contexts. The contributions include a description of the evolution of the Romance and Germanic languages and their significance relative to Latin in negotiating the religious and political marketplace of Medieval and Reformation Europe; an examination of the state of theoretical debates on the frame of “public religion” with regard to mediatized public expression; a chapter focusing on media portrayals of nonreligious individuals (and challenging the myth of an antireligious media); a multimethod examination of YouVersion's Bible App, including paratext (though not using that word) and readership analyses; and a rapid-fire description of the parody-filled American religious movement known as the Church of the SubGenius, in comparison with the French UFO religion of Raelism (for a seminal, in-depth examination of an American UFO religion, a work contributing to the theoretical framework of cognitive dissonance, see Festinger).