"Bringing together scholarly perspectives from around the world and across disciplines, the authors explore how 'spiritualities' express themselves through and with media - from television to Internet, from fashion to art murals - as socially transforming voices and practices. The very fluidity of t
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he meaning of spirituality is part of its appeal: it can service as easily as a reference to a perceived common essence of humanness as it can work to legitimate market-based practices. While the involvement of spiritual life with social transformation is certainly not peculiar to contemporary societies, what has changed is the upsurge of media in these matters. In the specific case of religion, globalization has unleashed a cascade of unexpected and unpredictable implications, many of which are consequences of the media." (Publisher description)
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"We have surveyed the history of the study of new media and religion, identified heuristic perspectives helpful in organizing current scholarship, and appraised methodologies employed in the study. The study of new media and religion has evolved from extreme utopian/dystopian discourses to a better
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understanding of the observable effects of new media, to incorporating into its scholarship diverse disciplines—hence the “protestantization” of the field. Perspectives on religion and the Internet vary within religious traditions, as the diversity of thought within Christian uses demonstrates. Current heuristic perspectives in the study include the Internet as an information dissemination medium, the relationship between online and offline religion, the potential influence of online religion on offline religion, the distinction between online-religion and religion-online, and observations of the Internet medium itself. Researchers emply both qualitative and quantitative methodologies in the study of new media and religion, with each methods having its advantages." (Conclusion, page 16)
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"The article addresses the use of the internet by Islamic social movement organizations (SMOs), focusing on the case of Justice and Charity (JC), the biggest opposition political group in Morocco. It examines the extent to which the SMO exploits the potential of the medium in collective action, and
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the implications of this use for the SMO’s capacity to advance its cause and resist state repression. Drawing on social movement and radical democracy theories, the study highlights the implications of the internet for collective identity-building in the political project of the Islamic SMO. The article argues that while JC draws extensively on the internet to enhance collective identity-construction and build an antagonistic public sphere, it fails to benefit from the potential of the medium to promote gender equality and genuine participative communication, and to build an agonistic political sphere." (Abstract)
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"Papua New Guinea’s Tok Pisin language newspaper Wantok, founded in 1969, is one of the publishing icons of the South Pacific. Drawing on interviews with Fr Francis Mihalic and Bishop Leo Arkfeld made in the early 1990s, a manuscript history of the early days of the Wantok, written by Mihalic, and
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material drawn from the archives in the Society of the Divine Word’s mother house in Mt Hagen, this article seeks to present a picture of a man who was at once a priest, a publisher, a propagandist, a linguist, a lecturer and often a cause of bewilderment to the very bishops whose work he was supposed to be doing. While acknowledging Mihalic’s role as the creator of Wantok, it places the emergence of the newspaper within an historical, educational, religious and social framework that shows it emerging and growing in response to several broad trends." (Abstract)
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"Twenty years after the fall of communism in Romania, there are two main pilgrimages that dominate the Orthodox religious environment: the pilgrimage to Saint Parascheva of Iasi and the pilgrimage to Saint Dumitru cel Nou, Basarabov in Bucharest. These two pilgrimages are practiced in old sacred cen
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tres with a long tradition and with their own unique identity. The objective of this article is focused on how the mass mass media understands and relates to the religious phenomenon and the way that journalists depict the image of the pilgrimages in the published articles. The study investigates the articles published in newspapers during the period 1990-2010 and frames the information according to the existing interest areas." (Abstract)
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"As the manuscript treasures in the libraries of Timbuktu and throughout the northwestern quarter of Africa become known, many questions are raised. How did a manuscript culture flourish in the Sahara and in Muslim Africa more generally? Under what conditions did African intellectuals thrive, and ho
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w did they acquire scholarly works and the writing paper necessary to contribute to knowledge? By exploring the history of the trans-Saharan book and paper trades, the scholarly production and teaching curriculae of African Muslims and the formation, preservation and codicology of library collections, the authors of this original volume provide a variety of answers. The select number of invited contributions represents current research in the material, technological, economic, and cultural dimensions of manuscript production, circulation, and preservation, and the development of specific scholarly and intellectual traditions in Saharan and Sudanic Africa." (Publisher description)
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"The religious media in Cuba currently provide the most substantial alternative to the official media, other than academic and cultural publications such as TEMAS and those of the universities and research centers. Given that the academic and cultural publications are published by institutions techn
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ically within the state sector, the religious media is, using a strict definition, the only fully autonomous media sector in Cuba, other than the independent journalists’ movement. With respect to the religious media in Cuba, it should be noted that virtually all suffer from a scarcity of resources. Most of the material resources come from abroad and are subject to government regulation and control, thereby encouraging caution on the part of churches and other religious organizations. They, as well as foreign religious donors, have been careful not to become identified with some of the dissident or oppositional sectors of civil society. Even so, the increased role of religions in responding to the socioeconomic needs of the population has expanded the credibility and influence of most religions within civil society and hence their publications. Overall, while religions and the religious media are emerging as critical elements of a revitalizing civil society, there is an understandable desire on their part not to precipitate serious conflicts with the government. While religious leaders, by and large, may have become more publicly critical of the government, this has not translated into substantial efforts on their part to directly mobilize civil society." (Conclusion, page 199-200)
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"In the Republic of Benin, we are currently witnessing an enormous proliferation of religious radio broadcasting in various forms, especially with regard to Pentecostal churches. Apart from already established Christian broadcasters such as Radio Immaculée Conception, Radio Alléluia or Radio Maran
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atha, operating on a regional or even on a national scale, various smaller groups and individual pastors, mainly from evangelical and Charismatic churches, are increasingly contracting broadcasting hours with public, private or community radio stations. Furthermore, many pastors have started to record CDs with prayers and gospel sounds to broadcast, or hire professional media production companies to ensure a large media coverage of their appearances in various media. On the one hand, these strategies represent a particular form of media appropriation, an attempt to obtain a greater share in the changing public sphere, and are part of the growing competition between various religious media actors, especially with regard to their ambitions of moral guidance. On the other hand, these programmes could be seen as stages for creative individual religious actors, among them also laymen, offering moments of self-assertion and granting social prestige." (Abstract)
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"Die Umbrüche in Ägypten 2011 haben gezeigt, dass Medien eine wesentliche Rolle für die Mobilisierung politischer Partizipation spielen. Die Muslimbruderschaft, einer der wichtigsten gesellschaftlichen Akteure Ägyptens, hat seit 2002 gezielt auf Internetmedien gesetzt, um das Regime Mubaraks her
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auszufordern. Unter Rückgriff auf Ansätze aus der Forschung zu sozialen Bewegungen und politischer Transformation ordnet die Autorin zunächst die Medienstrategien der Islamisten in die Strukturen des politischen Systems und des Mediensystems Ägyptens ein. Mittels einer Inhaltsanalyse der Website der Muslimbrüder, ikhwanonline.com, Interviews mit deren Produzenten sowie einer Nutzerbefragung wird überprüft, welches Potenzial islamistische Medien haben, zu einer Demokratisierung Ägyptens beizutragen." (Klappentext)
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"Although conflict is a normal aspect of human life, mass media technologies are changing the dynamics of conflict and shaping strategies for deploying rituals. Rituals can provoke or escalate conflict; they can also mediate it. Media representations have long been instrumental in establishing, main
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taining, and challenging political and economic power, as well as in determining the nature of religious practice. This collection of chapters emerged from a two-year project based on collaboration between the Faculty of Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and the Ritual Dynamics Collaborative Research Center at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Here, chapters locate, describe, and explore cases in which media-driven rituals or ritually saturated media instigate, disseminate, or escalate conflict. Each chapter, built around global and local examples of ritualized, mediatized conflict, is multiauthored. The book’s central question is: when ritual and media interact (either by the mediatizing of ritual or by the ritualizing of media), how do the patterns of conflict change?" (Publisher description)
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