Why do people refurbish some historical tales from time to time, adding new versions to be displayed publicly? Powerful cultural elements can be invoked for many purposes, and the morals derived from the fables can be quite different. When individuals are blessed with a rich cultural heritage, they may delve into it to find wisdom for themselves…

Dilemmas of means and ends are an enduring theme of all narratives. One kind of story involves the demands of communal loyalty and group survival opposed to personal sentiments and ethical universals. Love and duty, justice and mercy are well known examples of such oppositions. The contradictions are even more excruciating in a multicultural…

Each of the world's major cities is known in the movie world as the exemplar of a specific mood, atmosphere, or spirit and the natural setting for particular kinds of movie stories. Paris, London, New York, and Chicago have their respective types of picture. Los Angeles has such an urban personality in imagination. Those distinctive story lines…

Popular culture requires readily identifiable villains. Subcultural groups often serve this role, creating controversies. Controversies based on religion are especially bitter. As a rule, religion in the movies is inoffensively sentimental, but "The Da Vinci Code" is both popular and provocative, treading on the dangerous ground of Jesus's…

Far too many Americans and people in other societies face the pain of losing work, so that deprivation is not a rare event. But sometimes, and especially in a popular culture, it is not the job that is lost, but the promise that the job and the one who performed it would be valued. The calamity is to be good at one's trade and to find that it…

People call on their cultural resources to find relief for their fears and reassurance about their hopes. Among those resources is the mysterious and hazardous tool called leadership. There are many traditions of leadership in world cultures, but the contemporary notions about leading and leaders are ever-changing, so that traditional…

Drawing from data collected through classroom observations and in-depth interviews, this article describes and analyzes practices identified as culturally responsive by Latinos students in an urban, multiethnic/racial context. The findings suggest that culturally responsive pedagogy must be more broadly conceptualized to address the cultural…

If America is culturally diverse by history and habit, it is religiously diverse by design and by law. Although religion may be the strongest form of shared culture, and although people refuse to have any official religious establishment, they are surprisingly reluctant to celebrate that form of diversity anymore. In this article, the author takes…

The main characters in a movie can serve individuals in many different ways, but the usual way is to appear good. In whatever form, stories of individuals are a useful part of popular culture when they offer models of how individuals might save themselves or be saved. However, there are other ways. Villains, monsters, and enemies can be at the…

"The Lord of the Rings" continues Hollywood's recurrent theme of good triumphing over evil. The viewer is supposed to identify with the heroes, whiteness, and goodness, which of course triumphs over evil and blackness. Although the cast is made up almost entirely of White people, people also do not question this narrative of White supremacy. To…

Culture offers people suggestions for dealing with life's vicissitudes, and people find different suggestions in different cultures. In a multicultural society, they have a variety of alternatives to choose among: ethnicities, regionalisms, lifestyles, religious movements, occupations, hobbies, and more. In American society, the groups that are…

In this study, I examine the perspectives of preservice teachers enrolled in a multicultural education course at a large predominately White Midwestern university. Past research on the development of multicultural attitudes and knowledge of White preservice teachers is inconclusive. In an effort to examine the multicultural perspectives of…