"Em geral os estudos sobre a relação evangélicos e mídia se notabilizam pela apreciação geral que fazem do assunto. Considerando a situação de pluralismo religioso e a sociedade contemporânea como mercadológica e a necessidade de se estudar as rádios evangélicas do Rio de Janeiro, mostra
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r-se-á neste artigo uma categoria de análise que servirá para identificar as mídias religiosas que tem por motivação a livre concorrência e não a missão e o proselitismo." (Resumo)
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"This article addresses the interface of video-films and Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity in Ghana. This interface, it is argued, needs to be examined from a position that transcends the confines of film studies and religious studies and leaves behind a secularist perspective on the relationship
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between religion and film. On the basis of detailed ethnographic research, it is shown that, far from standing apart from the realm of religious beliefs, video-films call upon audiovisual technologies so as to remediate Pentecostal views of the invisible world around which Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity evolves. Video-films invoke a “techno-religious realism” that addresses spectators in such a way that they authorize video representations as authentic. Transcending facile oppositions of technology and belief, media and authenticity, and entertainment and religion, video-films are shown to achieve immediacy and authenticity not at the expense of, but thanks to, media technologies and practices of remediation." (Abstract)
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"This article will describe the impact of North American religious television in two very different Latin American contexts: Guatemala in Central America and Brazil in South America. From these common North American roots, Guatemala and Brazil provide contrasting case studies of how religious entrep
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reneurs struggle to place their messages in the media marketplace. Guatemala provides a study in marginality: despite having built impressive religious institutions, Guatemala’s Pentecostal television preachers have had little success in getting their message before the general populace on commercial television. Guatemala’s highly fragmented social and ecclesial climate has led to fierce competition for the loyalty of the faithful between religious entrepreneurs who have only limited impact in the larger society. Brazil, on the other hand, provides examples of Pentecostal preachers who have built successful religious franchises that have accumulated sufficient resources to finance major incursions into the commercial media. The concluding section will explore how symbolic goods are marketed in today’s global religious supermarket." (Introduction, page 49)
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"This book moves beyond sensationalism to consider how the evangelical movement has effectively targeted Americans—as both converts and consumers—since the 1970s. Thousands of products promoting the Christian faith are sold to millions of consumers each year through the Web, mail order catalogs,
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and even national chains such as Kmart and Wal-Mart. The author explores the vast industries of film, video, magazines, and kitsch that evangelicals use to spread their message. Focusing on the center of conservative evangelical culture—the white, middle-class Americans who can afford to buy “Christian lifestyle” products—she examines the industrial history of evangelist media, the curious subtleties of the products themselves, and their success in the religious and secular marketplace. To garner a wider audience, evangelicals have had to carefully temper their message, but in so doing, they have painted themselves into a corner. In the postwar years, evangelical media wore the message of salvation on its sleeve, but as the evangelical media industry has grown, many of its most popular products have been those with heavily diluted Christian messages." (Publisher description)
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"In this article I examine the elective affinity between Pentecostalism and the vibrant video-film industry that has flourished in the wake of Ghana’s adoption of a democratic constitution. I argue that, as a result of the liberalization and commercialization of the media, a new public sphere has
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emerged that can no longer be fully controlled by the state but that is increasingly indebted to Pentecostalism. Pentecostalism and video-films come together and articulate alternative, Christian imaginations of modernity. Seeking to grasp the blurring of boundaries between religion and entertainment, I examine the pentecostalite cultural style on which these alternative visions thrive. My main concern is to investigate the specific mode through which Pentecostal expressive forms go public, thereby transforming the public sphere." (Abstract)
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"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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"In many parts of Africa, charismatic-Pentecostal churches are increasingly and effectively making use of mass media and entering the public sphere. This article presents a case study of a popular charismatic church in Ghana and its media ministry. Building on the notion of charisma as intrinsically
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linking religion and media, the aim is to examine the dynamics between the supposedly fluid nature of charisma and the creation of religious subjects through a fixed format. The process of making, broadcasting and watching Living Word shows how the format of televisualisation of religious practice creates charisma, informs ways of perception, and produces new kinds of religious subjectivity and spiritual experience. Through the mass mediation of religion a new religious format emerges, which, although originating from the charismatic-Pentecostal churches, spreads far beyond and is widely appropriated as a style of worship and of being religious." (Abstract)
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"In this essay, I will look at and listen to a charismatic TV screen in Ghana, showing a sermon by the popular charismatic pastor Mensa Otabil in Accra. While watching the programme Living Word I will address the relation between charisma and screens and examine the place of screens in the construct
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ion of charisma by looking not only at the screen but also behind the screen, in the editing studio, and in front of the screen, in the living room." (Abstract)
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"As a result of the liberalisation and commercialisation of the media in the wake of Ghana's return to a democratic constitution in 1992, there has emerged a new public sphere which has been successfully and effectively colonised by Pentecostal-charismatic churches and led to the rise of a Pentecost
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alite public culture geared towards Christian entertainment. This paper focuses on the popular video-film industry, which stays close to audience expectations and deliberately appropriates Pentecostal styles of representation. Examining the entanglement of cinema and church, video-filmmakers and pastors, I argue that the marked presence of Pentecostal styles of representation in the public sphere contributes to the spread of a social imaginary geared towards the recuperation of the project of modernity under the new condition of an open public sphere, characterised by the retreat of the state and the overwhelming presence of market forces." (Abstract)
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"One characteristic of Brazilian neo-Pentecostal ministries that draw on the Faith Movement is an accentuation of performative and metonymic linkages between supernatural power and ritual. While sharing elements with a broader transnational Faith movement, this Prosperity theology and its associated
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practices emerge out of the contemporary sociocultural context of Brazilian 'popular' religions as they relate to a consumer economy. The paper addresses the role of particular kinds of objects and material media in the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. Such symbolic media configure a distinctly Pentecostal projection of local-global relations. The analysis also considers an example of temple architecture and the construction of a Biblical theme park by the Universal Church in Rio de Janeiro. The symbolic and metonymic treatment of physical space builds up connections between believers, temporality, certain forms of historicity, and sacred geography in a way that resonates with other activities in the Church." (Abstract)
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"Starting out from a celebrated 1995 controversy which arose from a late-nigt incident on Brazilian TV, the relationaships between neo-Pentcostalism and establishe culture are explored. Taking into account traditions of legal rhetoric and of political adherence, the paper shows that what appears at
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one level as a religious conflict is at another level a conflict over political power, over the rhetoric and imagery of power, and for control of the popular imaginary." (Abstract)
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"How do religious collectivities which are predicated on the Word generate images of themselves in the highly competitive religious marketplaces of many African urban spaces today?' Focusing on the burgeoning Christian charismatic and pentecostal movements of Ghana and Nigeria, I explore how and why
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these movements are increasingly favoring electronic media as suitable sites for the transmission of their teachings and erecting of their empires. I will show how this process, no more than two decades old, both concurs with and challenges their religious ideology. I argue further that these developments result in transformation of the religious landscape in at least two ways: one, they are facilitating transnational and homogenizing cultural flows, and two, they are taking the connections between these movements and the net- works they create to new, global levels. Given my concern to identify African agency in these transnational developments, local forces feature more prominently in the discussion of this." (Abstract)
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