Practicing Religion in the Age of the Media: Explorations in Media, Religion, and Culture

Increasingly, the religious practices people engage in and the ways they talk about what is meaningful or sacred take place in the context of media culture-in the realm of the so-called secular. Focusing on this intersection of the sacred and the secular, this volume gathers together the work of media experts, religious historians, sociologists of religion, and authorities on American studies and art history. Topics range from Islam on the Internet to the quasi-religious practices of Elvis fans, from the uses of popular culture by the Salvation Army in its early years to the uses of interactive media technologies at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Beit Hashoah Museum of Tolerance. The issues that the essays address include the public/private divide, the distinctions between the sacred and profane, and how to distinguish between the practices that may be termed "religious" and those that may not.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: The Cultural Construction of Religion in the Media Age, by Stewart M. Hoover 1. Overview: The "Protestantization" of research into Media, Religion, and Culture, by Lynn Schofield Clark Part 1. Mediation in Popular Religious Practice 2. Protestant Visual Practice and American Mass Culture, by David Morgan 3. Believing in Elvis: Popular Piety in Material Culture, by Erika Doss Part 2. The Mediation of Religion in the Public Sphere 4. Public Art as Sacred Space: Asian American Community Murals In Los Angeles, by J. Shawn Landres 5. All the World's a Stage: The Performed Religion of the Salvation Army, 1880-1920, by Diane Winston 6. "Turn It Off!": TV Criticism in theChristian Century Magazine, 1946-1960, by Michele Rosenthal Part 3. Religion Made Public Through the Media 7. Between Objectivity and Moral Vision: Catholics and Evangelicals in American Journalism, by John Schmalzbauer 8. The Southern Baptist Controversy and the Press, by Mark G. Borchert Part 4. Implicit Religion and Mediated Public Ritual 9. Scapegoating and Deterrence: Criminal Justice Rituals in American Civil Religion, by Carolyn Marvin 10. Ritual and the Media, by Ronald L. Grimes Part 5. Explicit and Public Expression in New Media Contexts 11. Allah On-Line: The Practice of Global Islam in the Information Age, by Bruce B. Lawrence 12. Internet Ritual: A Case Study of the Construction of Computer-Mediated Neopagan Religious Meaning, by Jan Fernback 13. Religious Sensibilities in the Age of the Internet: Freethought Culture and the Historical Context of Communication Media, by David Nash Part 6. Specific Religions and Specific Media in National and Ethnic Contexts 14. Religious Television in Sweden: Toward a More Balanced View of Its Reception, by Alf Linderman 15. Religious to Ethnic-National Identities: Political Mobilization Through Jewish Images in the United States and Britain, 1881-1939, by Michael Berkowitz 16. Between American Televangelism and African Anglicanism, by Knut Lundby 17. "Speaking in Tongues, Writing in Vision": Orality and Literacy in Televangelistic Communications, by Keyan G. Tomaselli and Arnold Shepperson Contributors Index

About the Author :
Stewart M. Hoover is the author of Religion in the News: Faith and Journalism in American Public Discourse, among other books. He is professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where Lynn Schofield Clark is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Mass Media Research.

Review :
It is diffucult to imagine that Hoover and Clark's collection will not work to inspire and encourage further research...The book should have considerable value to students of this field. -- Gustav Niebuhr Journal of the American Academy of Religion