"In this essay I have tried to show how, by taking as point of departure an understanding of religion as a practice of mediation, Pentecostalism has increasingly ‘taken place’, so to speak, in the public sphere as a result of Ghana’s turn to democracy and the liberalization and commercializati
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on of the media. Relatively undisturbed by the state, but all the more indebted to the emerging image-economy, Pentecostalism has spread in space, disseminating signs and adopting formats not entirely of its own making, and been taken up by popular culture. In the entanglement of religion and entertainment new horizons of social experience emerged, thriving on fantasy and vision and popularizing a certain pentecostally oriented mood. This movement of spatial extension, as I tried to show, is at times criticized from within, as pastors and believers fear to loose control. Yet, the fact that, on the level of experience, distraction and devotion are kept apart cannot be summoned in defense of an ontological difference between cinema and church, entertainment and religion. At the same time it would be too easy to simply write off the public appearance of Pentecostal-derived images as mere entertainment, as if the format of entertainment would completely absorb the religious and, in a sense, put an end to religion. The point is that in Ghana, Pentecostalism is alive and kicking exactly because it casts religion in a new (postmodern?) form, which is geared to mass spectatorship and part and parcel of Zerstreuung. Zerstreuung is meant here in the sense of ‘the dispersed, centrifugal structure of mass phenomena’ (Weber 1996: 94) which, as Benjamin showed, is condensed in the technology of film as it blows apart the prison of metropolitan space by ‘the dynamite of the tenth of a second’ and offers adventurous travelling among the ruins (1978:236), and puts together its imaged elements under new laws, which require new ways of reception that parallel the process of recording." (Conclusion)
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"Interreligious dialogue schemes based upon different faith traditions exist; however, to chose one scheme over another can generate religious tensions, possible accusations of bias and even event-cumreligion snubbing. One way of circumventing this potential problem is to adopt a generic, non-sectar
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ian model based upon human communication science. The critical literature was reviewed and Taylor et al. 's (1977) classic transactional communication model (TCM) was explicated. This eight-element model comprising of (1) Source, (2) Stimulus, (3) Receiver, (4) Sensory Receptors, (5) Interpretation/Response, (6) Noise, (7) Feedback and (8) Situation/Context was applied to a hypothetical bi-lateral dialogue to demonstrate its methodological viability. This scientific (re)conceptualisation of dialoguing redefined its constitutive elements, provided new insights into the theoretical foundations of the enterprise, and highlighted important praxis requirements for the design, organisation and running of future events." (Abstract)
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