The Rise of Charismatic Heathenism: Power and Popular Culture in Contemporary Norse-Oriented Religion (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9783032074126)

Jane Skjoldli is a Professor in the Study of Religion at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. Her research interests are contemporary Catholicism, Charismatic Christianity, and Norse-oriented contemporary Paganism, as well as analytical approaches relating particularly to material religion, religion and digital games, and religion and popular culture more broadly. She is Principal Investigator of the research project Back to Blood: Pursuing a Future from the Norse Past, which is funded by the Norwegian Research Council. She defended her Ph.D. in the study of religion at the University of Bergen in 2018, and published her thesis with the book World Youth Day: Religious Interaction at a Catholic Festival (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2021). She has also co-edited an anthology about Charismatic Christianity in Finland, Norway, and Sweden with Jessica Moberg (Gothenburg University), and published several articles relating to religion and popular culture in both English and Norwegian. Skjoldli often combines research methods and analytical concepts in her work, preferring to draw on eclectic bodies of theory and methodology to find new ways of approaching relevant subjects. As such, her articles cover diverse topics, such as the aforementioned book on the Catholic Festival World Youth Day based on archival research and fieldwork where she drew on theory in digital games studies as well as material religion, media analyses of South Park and Viking-themed series and movies, to the development of new tools for analysis by building on existing concepts such as Bron Taylor's dark green religion. For this book, Skjoldli combines research results from a digital survey, follow-up interviews, and participant observation, approaching contemporary confluences of Vikings and popular culture with an interpretive framework she has developed over the past five years and continues to develop in this book: religious interaction, interface, and immersion.