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Wine culture, according to Robert Fuller, shares features with popular religion: a special vocabulary, ritualized behaviors, and ceremonies. Although wine drinking has become popular, there are still elements of elitism. Wine marketing sometimes uses snob appeal, but just as often makes fun of snobbery. Names of wines and wineries has become colorful and entertaining, partly to attract customers, but also as a larger part of the word-play in contemporary advertising. Many wines and wineries use animal names (Yellowtail, Black Swan, Funky Llama), and some are puns, like Bored Doe. Although choosing wines to complement food has always been a concern, greater attention and specificity has recently been applied to food-wine pairings; not just red wine with meat, but a Australian Shiraz with grilled rib lamb chops marinated in a mustard cream sauce.

This chapter discusses Harris's religious identity which is significant for understanding her life and her works. Although one scholar said that although Harris was famous for her attachment to traditional religion and piety, such a reputation belies her religious identity. Harris's reputation for conservative and traditional Christian values is understandable given the moralism that pervades her work. A self-proclaimed moral snob, Harris often used the southern evangelical discourse, believed in the significance of teaching the Ten Commandments in schools, and preferred the Old to the New Testament. However, Corra Harris, the circuit rider's wife is not of the evangelical south. In thinking and behavior, she was a long way from either traditional piety or the region's evangelical tradition. Although she believed in some of the ideas of religion, more often than not she expresses her aversion and non-belief to some of its ideas. While she read the Bible, she read it more as a literature than as a guide and instruction that would mold her life. Her works often suggest something more akin to deism than evangelicalism, and she was often a naturalist in many of her theological positions. Her experience of the divine was at times personal, but more often she wrote of God as an impersonal force.

This chapter explores Virginia Woolf's contradictory approach to social behavior by bringing Three Guineas in dialogue with Viola Tree's Can I Help You?, published by Hogarth Press in 1937. Can I Help You? offers a parallel context for Woolf's challenges to conventional values and rules of etiquette, one that also affirms manners as an evolving art form helpful, at best, in fostering harmonious human relationships in lives well lived. Although Woolf's writing has a much broader intellectual scope, Tree's “personal, humorous touch” manages to undermine “hierarchical rituals.” The rest of this chapter discusses Woolf's take on vulgarity and Tree's response to two potential criticisms: that she is a snob and that she is no authority on manners.

This chapter examines a handful of blogs and websites that have gained circulation within traditional media as well as the Internet. Three websites in particular—Racialicious, the Black Snob, and Color-Lines—exemplify a diverse, complex set of concerns and approaches to rethinking race in the twenty-first century. These sites provide readers with information and perspectives that were rare in traditional news media. Moving between identity groups, pop culture, and politics, these sites suggest that post-racialism requires people to be actively anti-racist in everyday life, and reminds everyone that any post-racial era will be the product of much more discussion and reform. The study conducted computer searches to see which key terms appeared most often with “post-racial.” The data reveals that although most people would agree that “post-racial” means that racism has been eliminated, commentators and journalists did not see fit to extol the virtues of anti-racism.