Stewart M. Hoover

Religion in the media age

Acknowledgements Introduction 1. What This Book Could be About 2. From Medium to Meaning: The Evolution of Theories About Media, Religion, and Culture 3. Media and Religion in Transition 4. Articulating Life and Culture in the Media Age: Plausible Narratives of the Self 5. Reception of Religion and Media 6. Cultural Objects and Religious Identity Among Born-Agains and Mainstream Believers 7. Cultural Objects and Religious Identity Among Metaphysical Believers, Dogmatists, and Secularists 8. Representing Outcomes 9. Media and Public Religious Culture Post-09/11/01 and Post-11/2/04 10. Conclusion: What is Produced? Appendix: Notes on Method References

Rethinking Media, Religion, and Culture

PART ONE: ANALYSIS OF MEDIA, RELIGION, AND CULTURE Introduction - Stewart M Hoover and Knut Lundby Setting the Agenda At the Intersection of Media, Culture, and Religion - Lynn Schofield Clark and Stewart M Hoover A Bibliographical Essay Religion and Media in the Construction of Cultures - Robert A White Technology and Triadic Theories of Mediation - Clifford G Christians PART TWO: MEDIA, RELIGION, AND CULTURE: CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY The Re-Enchantment of the World - Graham Murdock Religion and the Transformations of Modernity Mass Media as a Site of Resacralization of Contemporary Cultures - Jesus Martin-Barbero Escape from Time - Gregor Goethals Ritual Dimensions of Popular Culture The Dispersed Sacred - Gabriel Bar-Haim Anomie and the Crisis of Ritual The Web of Collective Representations - Knut Lundby PART THREE: MEDIA, RELIGION, AND CULTURE: CHANGING INSTITUTIONS Changes in Religion in Periods of Media Converegnce - Peter G Horsfield Media, Meaning and Method in Religious Studies - Chris Arthur Televangelism - Bobby C Alexander Redressive Ritual within a Larger Social Drama Resistance through Mediated Orality - Keyan G Tomaselli and Arnold Shepperson PART FOUR: MEDIA, RELIGION, AND CULTURE: INDIVIDUAL PRACTICE Psychologized Religion in a Mediated World - Janice A Peck A Utopian on Main Street - Claire Hoertz Badaracco Making Sense of Religion in Television - Alf Linderman Media and the Construction of the Religious Public Sphere - Stewart M Hoover Summary Remarks - Knut Lundby and Stewart M Hoover Mediated Religion

The Culturalist Turn in Scholarship on Media and Religion

The phenomenon of religion has long plagued the fields of mass communication research and media studies. Religion has been a special kind of challenge to both theory and research for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, there is a fundamental, irreducible quality of religion—thought of as its “substantive” dimension—that has proven formidable to a discipline that traces its intellectual roots to positivist social science. Rationalist science has had a difficult time dealing with something that seems always to reserve some part of itself from rational scrutiny. Second, there has been a tendency for the practitioners of media scholarship to think of religion as a trivial, insignificant, or fading dimension of social and cultural life. Third, beyond these two problems is the problem of religion itself. It is by its nature a complex, nuanced, sensitive, paradoxical, and multilayered phenomenon. Fourth, religion also can be said to exist at a kind of boundary between the “social” and the “cultural.” It has only been with the emergence of scholarships devoted to cultural studies that religion has come more clearly into scholarly focus. It is my purpose here to argue for the utility of such culturalist approaches to the study of media and religion. I do not think of culturalism as residing in any one literature or discipline (such as British cultural studies) but rather to be a package of theoretical and methodological sensibilities that have emerged from the encounter of a range of disciplines with culture and the ideas of the movement known broadly as cultural studies. The emerging encounter of media and religion studies with culturalism is broad and complex, and I attempt here to lay out a view of its sources, extents, and limits. My position is that to fully account for the relations and interactions between what is known as religion and what is known as media, this encounter needs to be explored for all of its possibilities. Further, I contend that this JOURNAL OF MEDIA AND RELIGION, 1(1), 25–36 Copyright

The Category of the Religious: The Blindspot of Contemporary Media Theory?.

This essay addresses the prospects of an approach to contemporary theory‐building which would take account of the realms of meaning, ontology and cultural practice traditionally in the province of religion. Beginning with an assessment of the germinal social theory of Durkheim, Weber and Marx, the investigation develops an interpretation of contemporary social and cultural life which conceives of “the religious” as radically located within “the secular.” Such a situation necessarily implicates some received understandings, particularly in the area of secularization and the larger Enlightenment project. Implications for media theory and research are explored, along with a set of implications for public and democratic discourse.

Trends in global communication policy‐making: Lessons from the Asian case∗

This paper surveys current trends in the restructuring of global communications since publication of the MacBride Commission Report on NWICO. Focusing on a specific region, Asia, the analysis addresses implications of the shift in communication policy from the dominant, twentieth century democratic conception of the ‘public’ as a community of free citizens, to a more archaic conception of the ‘public’ as individual consumers in a laissez‐faire’ market. The paper inquires into evidence of this policy shift in the Asian context as well as into the contemporary relevance of concerns expressed by NWICO advocates. Based on a substantive examination of recent literature, it is argued that since communication is a precondition to development, access to and control over the means and processes of communication are properly questions of great social importance. The paper further argues that current Asian trends converting communication into a commodity run counter to the possibilities for rational and autonomous p...

Controversy and cultural symbolism: Press relations and the formation of public discourse in the case of the RE‐imagining event

Publicity for non‐mainstream events and alternative ideas may come primarily out of the controversy they produce rather than as a result of intentional public relations efforts. In the case reviewed here, we explore how what might be understood as a private conversation in mainline religion—a branch of religion that currently receives little publicity‐became one of the top religion news stories of the year. Examining the publicity surrounding a seemingly small and inconsequential religious event, this study argues that news media interest in controversy‐in this case, on the topics of feminine images of God and female sexuality expressed in worship‐serves to give a public airing to otherwise marginally supported views and interests, thus allowing them to achieve a wider hearing. The publicizing of these views then resulted in the mobilization of both supporters and detractors of the views expressed. In this way, the media played an important role in contributing to the development of an alternative religio...

The gods of televangelism

This work provides a critical, interpretive study of two religious programmes - The 700 Club and The Jimmy Swaggert Telecast - and examines their appeal by situating them within the history of American religion and culture.

Media and the imagination of religion in contemporary global culture

This article argues for an invigorated scholarship of religion within cultural studies. It suggests that this is justified both on its own terms and because there is evidence that the interaction of media and religion is creating entirely new forms of the religious in contemporary public life. Religion persists in history, but it persists in part because of its mediation and this persistent, mediated religion constitutes a new evolution. The article presents a range of contexts where this can be seen to be happening, not least those contexts most involved in contemporary cultural globalization.

EVENT AND PUBLICITY AS SOCIAL DRAMA: A CASE STUDY OF THE RE-IMAGINING CONFERENCE 1995

This article argues that the Christian/Feminist conference RE-Imagining and its attendant publicity were a watershed event for contemporary American religion. An analysis of the controversy surrounding it highlights the degree to which the mediated symbolic environment now controls or conditions the practices, prospects, and prerogatives of religion. Challenging the view that the matter can be explained by the fact that religious conservatives were simply better at generating publicity than liberals, the article argues that the event owed its newsworthiness to the correspondence between its aftermath and a larger social drama (using Victor Turners framework), thus making for a dramatic and engaging news story. Because much of the struggle over the event has taken place through the mediated public sphere, resolution of these struggles must be a public and symbolic resolution as well as a personal and institutional one.

Listening Beyond the Echoes: Media, Ethics, and Agency in an Uncertain World

does not focus on fan fiction much at all, and the topic is notable for its absence. This could be read as a gendered omission, I suppose, though to the extent that it emerged consciously, it did so as an almost corrective strategy. My feeling at the time of writing was that types of fan fiction, most especially slash, had been over-represented in ethnographic and other scholarship, and that there were sets of variant fan practices – no more or less present in a wide range of media fandoms – that equally deserved and called for academic analysis. This book, of course, places fan fiction centerstage once more, and by so doing it focuses on specific types and modes of organized fandom. One of the most valuable aspects of this process, in my view, is that fan creativity is essayed not only in relation to the production of fannish literature, but that fans’ creative auto-theorization is brought into clearer focus in the academic sphere. Angelina I. Karpovich, for instance, notes: