"The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), a neo-Pentecostal religious group originally from Brazil, has attracted a great deal of attention since it was founded by Pastor Edir Macedo in 1977. Part of that attention is due to the group’s and its leaders’non-traditional religious practic
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es, which include syncretic versions of Christian Pentecostal, shamanistic, and Afro-Brazilian Umbandan rituals. A great deal of scrutiny, however, centers on the fact that since the UCKG purchased TV Record in the early 1990s, the group has become a major player in the very desirable and profitable Brazilian broadcasting market. This paper examines the rise of UCKG as a major media player in Brazil, and also sheds some light into the Church’s attempts at globalizing (or at least expanding) its television and radio holdings to other countries and regions." (Abstract)
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"Written by both leading academic authorities and by Muslim media practitioners, 'Muslims and the Media' is designed as a comprehensive and critical textbook and is set in both the British and international contexts. The book clearly establishes the links between context, content, production and aud
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iences thus reflecting the entire cycle of the communication process and revealing the ways in which meaning is produced and reproduced in the news media. Looking closely at the circumstances and politics surrounding the representation of Muslims across a wide range of journalistic genres, at the presence and influence of Muslims in the processes of news production, and the ways in which audiences, both Muslim and non-Muslim, consume this media, the book brings together coherently a wide range of perspectives to provide crucial insights into the representation - and misrepresentation - of Islam and Muslims today." (Publisher description)
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"Unsere heutige Gesellschaft ist wesentlich eine Mediengesellschaft. Umso wichtiger ist ein breiter Verständigungsprozess über medienethische Fragen. Diese Studie zeigt auf, inwiefern einzelne Christen als auch die Kirchen insgesamt ihre eigene Verantwortung im Umgang mit Medien haben. Im Rahmen e
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iner umfassenden Bestandsaufnahme wird der Blick besonders auf diejenigen gerichtet, die von den Medien selbst, aber auch in der Medienforschung nur wenig beachtet werden: Kinder und Jugendliche aus bildungsfernen Familien, Migranten und Behinderte. In Auseinandersetzung mit medienethischen Konzepten und dem kirchlich-theologischen Diskurs werden dann zentrale Prinzipien einer praktisch-theologischen Medienethik skizziert." (Verlagsbeschreibung)
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"This book contains the presentations of a Roundtable of invited scholars organized by the FABC-Office of Social Communication (FABC-OSC) October 3-7, 2005 at Assumption University Huamak campus in Bangkok, in cooperation with the Graduate School of Philisophy and Religion of Assumption University a
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nd the Asian Research Center for Religion and Social Communication (ARC) at St. John's University, Bangkok. The concern of the roundtable with some 20 participants was a deeper understanding of Social Communication in Religious Traditions of Asia. Social Communication defined as the communication of and in human society is part and parcel of every religion. The question was: How is this seen and practiced in the different religious traditions of Asia? With the publication of this volume, we would like to make people, especially communication scholars and theologians, more aware of the communication dimenstion of religions in Asia. Communication is not just the use of technical means and instruments like the mass media. It is a dimension of human and spiritual life which should be essential for any religious thinking and practice. It is also because of this that we purposely maintained and use the Vatican II expression 'Social Communication' which refers to all communicative processes and practices in human society." (Publisher description)
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"Filming the Gods examines the role and depiction of religion in Indian cinema, showing that the relationship between the modern and the traditional in contemporary India is not exotic, but part of everyday life. Concentrating mainly on the Hindi cinema of Mumbai, Bollywood, it also discusses India'
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s other cinemas. Rachel Dwyer's lively discussion encompasses the mythological genre which continues India's long tradition of retelling Hindu myths and legends, drawing on sources such as the national epics of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana; the devotional genre, which flourished at the height of the nationalist movement in the 1930s and 40s; and the films made in Bombay that depict India's Islamicate culture, including the historical, the courtesan film and the 'Muslim social' genre. Filming the Gods also examines the presence of the religious across other genres and how cinema represents religious communities and their beliefs and practices. It draws on interviews with film stars, directors and producers as well as popular fiction, fan magazines and the films themselves. As a result, Filming the Gods is a both a guide to the study of film in religious culture as well as a historical overview of Indian religious film." (Publisher description)
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"Looking at the everyday interaction of religion and media in our cultural lives, Hoover's new book is a fascinating assessment of the state of modern religion. Recent years have produced a marked turn away from institutionalized religions towards more autonomous, individual forms of the search for
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spiritual meaning. Film, television, the music industry and the internet are central to this process, cutting through the monolithic assertions of world religions and giving access to more diverse and fragmented ideals. While the sheer volume and variety of information travelling through global media changes modes of religious thought and commitment, the human desire for spirituality also invigorates popular culture itself, recreating commodities - film blockbusters, world sport and popular music - as contexts for religious meanings. Drawing on research into household media consumption, Hoover charts the way in which media and religion intermingle and collide in the cultural experience of media audiences." (Publisher description)
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"Capturing Believers" provides a history of the reception of American conservative evangelical missionary broadcasting from its inception in 1931 through the rise of the commercial era in 1970. The dissertation narrates accounts of two major Protestant stations, HCJB and ELWA, located in Ecuador and
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Liberia, respectively, as well as the U.S.-based project to build a custom transistor radio for the mission field. Employing a case-study approach, the thesis demonstrates the innovativeness of religious broadcasters who formulated a range of pragmatic responses to the drastic shortage of receiving sets in the southern hemisphere, including the use of social convention and the development of pretuned receiver technology. Missionary stations imported not only radios, but a constellation of American values into host countries through their reception activities. Overall, officials employed creative methods to construct a particular type of listener experience known as radio capture, characterized by regular listening in a domestic setting. By penetrating into the home or village and exposing listeners to proprietary broadcasts on a continual, even daily, basis, missionary receiver programs legitimized American conservative evangelicalism abroad and sowed seeds for a widespread revival of Protestantism in Latin America and Africa after 1970." (Summary)
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"There are films that retell biblical narratives and there are films that allude to the Bible or otherwise build on or appropriate biblical themes and images. The eleven lively and provocative articles in this volume explore both types of film, showcasing the cinema's impact on the perception of the
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Bible in modern culture." (Publisher description)
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"Da das Christentum im Wesentlichen auf Vermittlung, Verständigung und Kommunikation basiert, gehört das Bemühen um das Gelingen zwischenmenschlicher Kommunikation auch über die Medien theologisch betrachtet zur Aufgabe des Menschen. Wird das Miteinander von Menschen, das durch Kommunikation erm
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öglicht wird und damit auch das menschliche Personsein durch die Medien und Medienentwicklung in irgendeiner Weise beeinträchtigt oder behindert, ergeben sich damit nicht nur medienethische, sondern auch grundlegende Fragen von theologischer Bedeutung. Die Untersuchung unternimmt deshalb den Versuch, sich mit Medienethik aus theologischer Perspektive auseinanderzusetzen. Die Arbeit, die einer linearen Gliederung in Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und einem Ausblick in zukünftige Entwicklungen folgt, versucht einerseits in einer historischen Analyse die Entwicklungslinien einer Medienethik und das Verhältnis von Protestantismus und Medien nachzuzeichnen und zu interpretieren, und andererseits nach der theologischen Auseinandersetzung mit dem Phänomen medialer Kommunikation in der Gesellschaft zu fragen." (Verlagsbeschreibung)
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"The news media report global conflicts related to religion. New expressions of religiosity and spirituality appear in popular media culture. The relationship between media and the sacred has become an inevitable topic. This book offers new and fresh perspectives on the media, the sacred and religio
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n. It has a Nordic voice. This means that it focuses on empirical data collected from the Nordic countries. Most of the authors are from the Nordic region, critical views from other corners of the world are brought in as well. This book creates a platform for a genuinely multidimensional and crossdisciplinary discussion on the subject of the media, the sacred and religion in the context of (post)modern media." (Back cover)
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