{"id":3358,"date":"2013-10-07T23:27:16","date_gmt":"2013-10-08T06:27:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danielharper.org\/yauu\/?p=3358"},"modified":"2013-11-05T16:07:09","modified_gmt":"2013-11-06T00:07:09","slug":"the-real-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/2013\/10\/the-real-america\/","title":{"rendered":"The real America"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In his 1994 introduction to his 1981 novel <em>Hello, America<\/em>, J. G. Ballard writes: &#8220;The United States has given birth to most of our century&#8217;s dreams, and to a good many of its nightmares. No other country has created such a potent vision of itself, and exported that vision so successfully to the rest of the world&#8230;. Whenever I visit the United States I often feel that the real &#8216;America&#8217; lies not in the streets of Manhattan or Chicago, or the farm towns of the mid-west, but in the imaginary America created by Hollywood and the media landscape.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The real America is the imaginary America which is presented in pop culture; this makes sense to me. And this raises a question for me: should religion accommodate to this imaginary America, as for example Rick Warren and his version of the prosperity gospel do? &#8212; or should religion take pains to point out that the &#8220;real America&#8221; is really an imaginary America? &#8212; or should religion ignore altogether the problems caused by the imaginary America being the real America? Or put more starkly: should religion resist pop culture, or embrace it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In his 1994 introduction to his 1981 novel Hello, America, J. G. Ballard writes: &#8220;The United States has given birth to most of our century&#8217;s dreams, and to a good many of its nightmares. No other country has created such a potent vision of itself, and exported that vision so successfully to the rest of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/2013\/10\/the-real-america\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The real America&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[381],"class_list":["post-3358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pop-culture","tag-j-g-ballard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3358"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3359,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3358\/revisions\/3359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}