Janice M. Traflet

From money storage to money store: Openness and transparency in bank architecture

In the middle of the twentieth century, banks changed from ‘closed’ designs signifying wealth, security, and safety to ‘open’ designs signifying hospitality, honesty, and transparency as the perception of money changed from a passive physical substance to be slowly accumulated to an active notational substance to be kept in motion. If money is saved, customers must trust that the bank is secure and their money will be there when they want it; if money is invested, customers must trust that it is being done openly and honestly and they are being well-advised. Architecture visually communicates that the institution can be trusted in the requisite way.

HAS ELVIS LEFT THE BUILDING

This article probes the emergence and evolution of a culture of celebrity in the field of mutual fund management. After discussing the broad contours of the star-manager trend as well as specific examples from various historical junctures, this paper identifies and evaluates several theories to help explain the rise of celebrity fund managers. Finally, this article also endeavors to assess the importance of this trend, the likelihood of it persisting, as well as the long term impact of a culture of celebrity suffusing the world of mutual fund management.

A Review of “The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror”

W. Santana, an associate professor of English, and Gregory Erickson, who teaches world literature and writing, argue that an understanding of these relationships must take into account the paradoxical approach Americans have toward Christianity, at once valuing the sacred authority of the Bible as a literal text and insisting on their personal powers of interpretation apart from any doctrinal or church-authorized teachings. The authors claim that the connections between American religion and popular culture are so intertwined as to be indistinguishable; in their view, religion and popular culture necessarily reflect one another. The authors explore manifestations of that connection in chapters on Americans’ views of sacred texts, film, television, baseball, music, video games, and the spiritual warrior movement. The resulting analysis includes some amusing juxtapositions—Ralph Waldo Emerson and Clint Eastwood, “both skeptical of what they do not experience for themselves” (18); Jesus on the cross and Tigger the tiger stuck in a tree, both of whom questioned “just who is in charge of the story” (23)—intermixed with more serious considerations of how American popular culture allows its participants to produce religious meanings. The result is a book that is full of ideas and engaged with a wide range of scholarship—from American religious history to postmodernist critical theory to the Buffyology of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television serious—and that is at one creative, provocative, and occasionally baffling. Much of the book’s success depends on the reader’s willingness to accept the authors’ definitions of its key terms. Although the book’s title suggests a broader consideration of American religious groups, the authors announce that they will focus solely on Christianity (by which they appear to mean conservative evangelical, fundamentalist, and Pentecostal Christian beliefs and practices) because the majority of Americans profess to be Christians and because “Christian ideas exert such a strong force on American culture that all forms of religious expression in contact with the culture are colored by them” (5). Although a cursory familiarity with the history of how diverse American religious groups have adapted to the particular circumstances of religious practice in the United States suggests some truth to that statement, it fails to account for the ways in which other religious groups and their adherents have shaped American Christianity. Santana and Erickson are more persuasive in their disquisitions on popular music and television. In a revealing analysis of popular music, from jazz to music videos, they argue that this medium allows listeners and viewers to construct meanings in ways that parallel the American tendency simultaneously to assert the truth of a sacred text and to reinterpret its meaning. Assessing the British heavy metal band Iron Maiden’s 1982 album, The Number of the Beast, from its use of drums and harmony to its album cover, the authors find that “it is the extra-musical elements which provide the spiritual context for reception of the album, creating a condition which resembles the contradictory epistemology of belief in an inerrant sacred text while emphasizing every individual’s right to interpretation, which we have been arguing is present in American popular religion” (86). Other analyses, particularly a rambling disquisition on baseball, point to analogical similarities between religion and elements of popular culture without illuminating connections between the two, begging the question of whether baseball reflects American religion (or vice versa) or whether both are reflections of other, deeper currents in American culture. An energetic thought piece and work of critical analysis, Religion and Popular Culture points to some intriguing points of convergence. Religion and Popular Culture joins a vibrant scholarly conversation about American religion and popular culture, commodification, and practice, from historical contributions such as Jon Butler’s Awash in Sea of Faith (Harvard University Press, 1992; often cited by Santana and Erickson), which showed how interrelated folk practices and religious beliefs were in the early nineteenth century, to more recent studies of televangelism, Christian video games, and Christian rock. Although the book may pose some challenges for course integration (instructors of courses on American popular culture will need to be well-versed in American religious history and culture, as the book does not always provide sufficient background for students who are not already familiar with these topics), it will surely stimulate debate and dialogue among scholars curious about how American Christianity and popular culture shape one another as they interact in the world around us. REBECCA L. DAVIS University of Delaware Copyright