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MISSION STATEMENT
Religion and Media in the 21st Century
In the 21st century, religion is difficult to imagine detached from the
dizzying array of media that amplify and circulate its ideas and practices.
People are now beginning to recognize the significance of this development,
but there are few academic locations where the necessary interdisciplinary
academic expertise is available for understanding these processes across
diverse traditions, past and present.
In the contemporary world, the ways that religion and media mutually construct
each other are part of globalizing processes, yet the specific trajectories
of cultural meanings driving events cannot be understood apart from their
local conditions. This bifocality, which looks at both the global and the
local, is essential to any work hoping to comprehend such phenomena. For
example, the spectacle of burning bodies of Falun Gong protesters in Tiananmen
Square took place in part because of the expectation that this event would
be witnessed on the televisual world stage, where freedom of religious practice
has different meanings than it does in China. The constantly running fax
machine installed at the grave of a prominent Hasidic rabbi in Queens, NY,
becomes the unlikely local but powerful focus of the spiritual aspirations
of a worldwide community of Jewish believers. The broadcast on Indian television
of Hindu "mythologicals" in the early 1990s helped to escalate
the rise of the Hindu National Party and religious violence within India;
their overseas broadcast helped to mobilize support for that cause in the
global South Asian diaspora.
In other words, contemporary mass media have an extraordinary capacity to
collapse both space and time in ways that have profound implications for
religious experience. They can bring people together who are at a distance
from each other spatially, thus making almost instantaneous processes that
might have taken years in the past. For example, the televisual experience
of Christian ministry, proselytizing on the internet, and the fomenting
of religious violence over the radio contrast with older forms of communication
that mediated religious community building more slowly.
Religious ideas, of course, have circulated through a variety of media for
millennia. Spectacles such as the crucifixion or the revelation of divine
knowledge in different textual forms have been crucial in shaping religious
experience. Rather than assuming the connection between Religion and Media
to be uniquely modern, we understand their relationship to encompass a broad
range of phenomena: from the historical circulation of portable print texts
such as Buddhist sutras and the Jewish Torah; to the spread of Koranic tafsir
throughout the Muslim world on audiocassettes and the worldwide circulation
of Christian evangelical broadcasting, and most recently, the proliferation
of religious practices of all sorts on the internet.
Despite these developments, the relationship between religion and modern
mass media has been, until recently, remarkably understudied. In 1996, Hoover
and Venturelli argued that religion and media are each other's blind spots,
particularly in the representation and analysis of non-western religions
in the West. This neglect, with the exception of a few works, is particularly
striking, given the significance of the rapid uptake of all kinds of media
in the expression, circulation, and representation (or misrepresentation)
of religious life worldwide.
In the last five years, several important new edited anthologies have been
published that frame the emerging scholarly field of Religion and Media.
These include: Stewart M. Hoover and Knut Lundby’s Rethinking Media,
Religion and Culture (1997); Hent DeVries and Samuel Weber’s Religion
and Media (2001) and Stewart M. Hoover and Lynn Schofield Clark’s
Practicing Religion in the Age of Media (2001). One can see a shared project
and trajectory in these works: to recognize the significance of the study
of media as an aspect of religious practice. Representing different intellectual
traditions, this new work moves beyond a prevailing intellectual prejudice
against popular media as a degrading influence on, if not an antagonistic
competitor with, religious life. These anthologies recognize in the religious
use of media such as television, the renewed appearance of classic themes
in the study of religion such as charisma, authority, ritual, suffering,
salvation, and community.
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