Practicing Atheism

Practicing Atheism is a cultural study of contemporary atheism, focusing on how atheists negotiate meanings and values through media. This book examines a variety of cultural products, both corporate-driven and grassroots, that circulate messages about what atheism means - what ideas, values, affinities, and attitudes the term denotes. Through the creation, consumption, and exchange of this media, atheism gains positive content, the term signaling much more than lack of belief in god(s) for those who identify with the emergent culture. Primary source materials for this book include grassroots Internet communities, popular television programming, organized atheist events, and material culture representations of the movement, such as those found in atheist fan art. Practicing Atheism argues that atheist culture emerges from a unique tension with religion - a category atheists critique and resist but also, at times, imitate and approximate. Using a framework based on ritual studies, this book theorizes ambivalence, ambiguity, and in-betweenness" as the essential condition of contemporary atheist culture"--