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VIRTUAL CASE BOOKS
Proselytizing Media was begun by a group of scholars led by Tanya Erzen at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University in 2003. It was created as a way to think about how conservative Christian media resists easy distinctions between traditionally religious spaces and the public spaces of consumer and popular culture. Wal-Mart stores feature the novels of the New York Times best-selling Left Behind series detailing the rise of the anti-Christ and the years of tribulation following the rapture. Newspapers carry stories of Christian missionaries entering Iraq as part of a missionary push focused on Muslims, while Christian colleges and missionary schools develop sophisticated films, courses, and materials for missionaries to Muslim countries. Every summer, thousands of Christian teenagers flock to Cornerstone, a Christian rock festival that features music, Christian films, and seminars on topics such as teen dating and sexuality. These seemingly disparate examples of mediated religion show how innovative conservative Christians have been in utilizing film, music, publishing, and web technology as cultural activism.
http://www.nyu.edu/fas/projects/vcb/ChristianMedia/
9-11 and After: A Virtual Case Book is a prototype for
a planned series of what we are calling "virtual case books" (VCB),
each organized around a key area of cultural activism in which tactical
media play a central role. Because tactical
media practices are inherently responsive, interactive, and constantly
evolving, we chose a format that would make it possible to capture the
specificity of such developments in different political and cultural
contexts. We have also taken advantage of the interactivity offered by
web-based forms of publication, enabling us to invite others to join
an ongoing
conversation, and allowing readers to simultaneously access, analyze, and respond
to the ideas, images, resources, and the multitude
of links contained in the VCB.
Plans for this series were hatched at a workshop held in
April 2001 entitled Tactical Media: The Impact of New Media on
Cultural Activism and Political Engagement, organized by
The Center for Media, Culture and History
and funded by The Rockefeller Foundation through its Creativity and Culture Program,
which also provided funding for this casebook.
VCB 9-11
Editors: Barbara Abrash and Faye Ginsburg
Assistant Editor: Mariana Johnson
Technical Support: Tal Halpern, NYU Instructional Technology Services
Website: Picture Projects with Alison Cornyn and Sue Johnson, Britta Frahm
Funding for this project has been provided by The Rockefeller Foundation
We are currently in development on a new VCB: "Proselytizing Media: Conservative
Christian Media Encounters the World."
http://www.nyu.edu/fas/projects/vcb/case_911_FLASHcontent.html
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