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06 JUNE 2004
06 June 200412:18 pm: Since Revealer editor Jeff Sharlet blurbed What Would Buffy Do? The Vampire Slayer as Spiritual Guide -- "At last, a Buffy book as smart as Buffy, the show. Riess has given us the key to understanding the subtle theology of slayage, but her book is meaningful beyond the Buffyverse, too -- What Would Buffy Do? is an erudite and extremely entertaining meditation on ethics, morality, and how to save the world. A lot." -- The Revealer has an interest in seeing that the book does well. Fortunately, just a few weeks after publication, it already has, reports William Lobdell in The LA Times, writing on the book and a recent academic conference dedicated to the how. The book also gets a buzz from Books & Culture, an intellectual evangelical review. Tell that to Brent Bozell and the Parents Television Council, a Christian group that several years in a row ranked Buffy one of the ten worst shows for its "underlying occultist element." WWBD author Reiss, who took a doctorate in religious studes from Columbia before becoming religion editor at Publishers Weekly, is perhaps in a better position to judge. Not just because she's an academic expert and a journalist long on the beat, but because she's also a Mormon -- one of the few, she notes in conversation with The Revealer, in big media. As such, she knows anti-religious sentiment when she sees it. Mormons, she points out, remain an acceptable subject of derision and denouncement, as evidenced by a thousand sitcom cracks and the respect with which Jon Krakauer's anti-Mormon screed, Under the Banner of Heaven, was greeted. Reiss isn't another anti-religion crusader, and she's certainly not an occultist. As Christy Risser-Milne puts it, Reiss "honestly and eloquently names, through the lens of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the reason so many churches are empty today. Why the buffet that religion has become is so attractive. Why the absolutes proffered by fundamentalists in any faith are so often rejected by the young." Both Buffy and Reiss, she adds, are theologians; more accurately, though, and in language Brent Bozell might appreciate, they're "spiritual warriors."
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