"This paper explores the transformative impact of social media on mediumship practice within the context of Mother Goddesses worship (Dao Mâu) in contemporary Vietnam. By examining the ways in which spirit mediums and practitioners utilise social media platforms, the study reveals that these digita
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l spaces facilitate the open expression of belief, foster connections among practitioners, and enable the sharing and promotion of spiritual services as well asthe online trade in ritual costumes and objects. Furthermore, social media has become a catalyst for emerging trends directly influencing the ritual practices and increasing the visibility of spirit mediums in today's society, creating generational shifts between younger spirit mediums and their predecessors, who practiced their belief in pre-renovation Vietnam under precarious circumstances. As rituals become more visible and accessible through social media, the interplay between digital and spiritual realms becomes increasingly significant. The findings suggest that social media not only enhances a sense of community among practitioners that transcends geographical boundaries, but also shapes the continuing developments of this traditional practices, contributing to a dynamic landscape of Mother Goddesses worship in Vietnam today. This research underscores the agency and significance of digital platforms, in particular social media, in transforming spiritual expressions and adapting cultural traditions in the modern era." (Abstract)
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"O artigo a se propõe a investigar os sentidos das novas formas de religiosidade secularizadas, tomando como objeto o movimento religioso Nova Era e seus produtos midiáticos no YouTube. O texto objetiva analisar como religiosidade e autoajuda entrelaçam seus discursos em uma ambiência midiatizad
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a, marcada pela diversidade, pela bricolagem religiosa e pelo imperativo da felicidade. Através de procedimentos metodológicos da análise de discurso de linha francesa, observam-se quais os sentidos que emergem do discurso de vídeos do canal Gisela Vallin no YouTube, que apresentam uma mística inspirada em variadas vertentes religiosas, inserindo-se no panorama do movimento Nova Era. Os vídeos são apresentados pela terapeuta holística Gisela Vallin, que traz temáticas de autoajuda lançando mão de ensinamentos de coaches e uma pluralidade de entidades religiosas como Osho, Buda, Jesus Cristo e espíritos mentores." (Resumo)
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"Facebook is home to a plethora of spiritual healers who use the social media platform for giving advice, selling products, and offering their services. In this ethnographic study, we examine the Facebook endeavors of Estonian spiritual healers. The study discusses the different forms of commodified
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spirituality, the affective and aspirational labor of healers put into creating those commodities, and the role social media affordances play in shaping these practices online." (Abstract)
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"A Bengali Dalit religion called Matua emerged in the nineteenth century in East Bengal. It counts tens of millions of followers across the Bay of Bengal and the Indo–Bangladesh border. With the COVID-19 pandemic, Matua religious gatherings were shifted online. This paper asks what happened to mul
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tisensory and sonic-haptic religious engagements of the Matua community once ritual gatherings were transported to the cyberspace of digital media. Using data collected through remote ethnography and digital ethnography with the Matua community in 2020 and 2021, we suggest that the increased online visibility of the Matua community (1) contributed to reshaping Matua identity narratives as a global diasporic network, downplaying previous self-definitions of untouchability and displacement; (2) exacerbated inequalities along class and gender lines; and (3) shifted the sensoryscape of Matua ritual experiences, with important repercussions in the domains of embodiment, ritual authority and authenticity. As Matua experiences of increased online visibility clashed with their traditional aesthetics of resistance through shared sonic commingling, we argue, more broadly, that understandings of visibility must take into consideration culturally informed articulations of the senses and sense hierarchies, and how sensory ideology can manifest following the affordances of different media." (Abstract)
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"Indigenous cultures have their belief systems, including the recognition of a supreme being, and with such recognition comes their moral systems, which guide how they live their lives. As for the Kankanaeys in the Cordillera Region of the Philippines, Kasiyana is one of the practices that portrays
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their belief in the divine and serves as a moral guide in their relationship with other people and the environment. The pervasiveness of Kasiyana in the Kankanaey cultures makes it a viable source of reflection in religious communication. Thus, the paper aims to make explicit how Kasiyana expressions and manifestations are forms of religious communication. The paper started by extracting how the COVID-19 survivor participants perceived, expressed, and manifested the Kasiyana. With the participants’ extracted manifestations of Kasiyana, the paper discussed how the Kankanaey concept of Kasiyana qualifies in some pertinent areas of religious communication. The paper also presented how Kasiyana is intertwined with Christian teachings, making it more sensible to discuss as religious communication." (Abstract)
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"Young people in the West are more likely to encounter religion in videogames than in places of worship like churches, mosques or temples. Lars de Wildt interviews developers and players of games such as Assassin’s Creed to find out how and why the Pop Theology of Videogames is so appealing to mod
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ern audiences. Based on extensive fieldwork, this book argues that developers of videogames and their players engage in a ‘Pop Theology’ through which laymen reconsider traditional questions of religion by playing with them. Games allow us to play with religious questions and identities in the same way that children play at being a soldier, or choose to ‘play house.’ This requires a radical rethinking of religious questions as no longer just questions of belief or disbelief; but as truths to be tried on, compared, and discarded at will." (Publisher description)
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"Fictional Practices of Spirituality" provides critical insight into the implementation of belief, mysticism, religion, and spirituality into worlds of fiction, be it interactive or non-interactive. This first volume focuses on interactive, virtual worlds - may that be the digital realms of video ga
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mes and VR applications or the imaginary spaces of life action role-playing and soul-searching practices. It features analyses of spirituality as gameplay facilitator, sacred spaces and architecture in video game geography, religion in video games and spiritual acts and their dramaturgic function in video games, tabletop, or LARP, among other topics. The contributors offer a first-time ever comprehensive overview of play-rites as spiritual incentives and playful spirituality in various medial incarnations." (Publisher description)
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"Wie kam es zu dem ikonischen Überschuss des christlichen Heiligenbildes? Janine Luge-Winter geht dieser Frage nach, indem sie die verschiedenen Argumente byzantinischen Bildapologien des 8. und 9. Jahrhunderts und der modernen Ikonentheorien des 20. Jahrhunderts erstmals in ihrer Studie versammelt
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, miteinander vergleicht und kontextualisiert. Sie zeigt, dass das Mehr der Ikone deren besonderer Sichtbarkeit ist, die eine Überwindung der Undarstellbarkeit des Undarstellbaren evoziert, indem sie das Undarstellbare konkret als solches akzeptiert. Verständlich wird dies nur, wenn die Ikone als »etwas anderes« als ein repräsentationales oder mimetisches Bild anerkannt wird." (Verlagsbeschreibung)
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"Superheld*innen sind in der Krise: Gut und Böse, Richtig und Falsch sind nach starken sozialen und politischen Umbrüchen längst nicht mehr klar und eindeutig. Für das Genre ein eklatantes Problem. Religion und Glaube könnten hier Orientierung bieten, verlieren aber - so der gängige Vorwurf -
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ihrerseits immer stärker an Bedeutung in einer säkularen Welt. Die Beiträger*innen des Bandes bieten einen ersten Zugang zu diesem Phänomen und kommen zu dem erstaunlichen Befund, dass religiöse Motivik dagegen ungebrochene Hochkonjunktur in der superheroischen Popkultur feiert. Figuren, Themen, Ikonographie, Symbole: Das religiöse Spielfeld des Superheroismus ist mannigfaltig." (Verlagsbeschreibung)
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"Less than a year after the end of authoritarian rule in 1998, huge images of Jesus Christ and other Christian scenes proliferated on walls and billboards around a provincial town [Ambon] in eastern Indonesia where conflict had arisen between Muslims and Christians. A manifestation of the extreme pe
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rception that emerged amid uncertainty and the challenge to seeing brought on by urban warfare, the street paintings erected by Protestant motorbike-taxi drivers signaled a radical departure from the aniconic tradition of the old colonial church, a desire to be seen and recognized by political authorities from Jakarta to the UN and European Union, an aim to reinstate the Christian look of a city in the face of the country's widespread islamicization, and an opening to a more intimate relationship to the divine through the bringing-into-vision of the Christian god. Stridently assertive, these affectively charged mediations of religion, masculinity, Christian privilege and subjectivity are among the myriad ephemera of war, from rumors, graffiti, incendiary pamphlets, and Video CDs, to Peace Provocateur text-messages and children's reconciliation drawings. Orphaned Landscapes theorizes the production of monumental street art and other visual media as part of a wider work on appearance in which ordinary people, wittingly or unwittingly, refigure the aesthetic forms and sensory environment of their urban surroundings." (Publisher description)
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"A novela bíblica é um gênero literário por excelência para o exercício da interação entre a comunidade que produziu o texto e a comunidade que o lê e o atualiza. Com suas cores próprias, a novela bíblica é um artifício popular que cresce em importância no período posterior ao exílio
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babilônio (538-145 A.E.C.). Ela assume o papel da profecia na defesa dos direitos do povo em Israel, mantém a esperança e aponta o caminho a seguir. Numa sociedade que cada vez mais centraliza o poder e a religião, a novela bíblica se torna o respiro do clamor popular. É nessa perspectiva que este livro apresenta as novelas bíblicas de José e seus irmãos, Jó, Rute, Cântico dos Cânticos, Ester, Daniel, Judite e Jonas." (Descrição da editora de livros)
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"Religion, Media, and Marginality in Modern Africa is one of the first volumes to put new media and old media into significant conversation with one another, and also offers a rare comparison between Christianity and Islam in Africa. The contributors find many previously unacknowledged correspondenc
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es among different media and between the two faiths. In the process they challenge the technological determinism-the notion that certain types of media generate particular forms of religious expression-that haunts many studies. In evaluating how media usage and religious commitment intersect in the social, cultural, and political landscapes of modern Africa, this collection will contribute to the development of new paradigms for media and religious studies." (Publisher description)
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"In both visual and linguistic forms, graphic narratives reveal representational strategies to encounter the sacred in all its ambivalence. Through close readings and critical inquiry, these essays contemplate the intersections between religion and comics in ways that critically expand our ability t
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o think about religious landscapes, rhetorical practices, pictorial representation, and the everyday experiences of the uncanny. Organized into four sections--Seeing the Sacred in Comics; Reimagining Sacred Texts through Comics; Transfigured Comic Selves, Monsters, and the Body; and The Everyday Sacred in Comics--the essays explore comics and graphic novels ranging from Craig Thompson's Habibi and Marvel's X-Men and Captain America to graphic adaptions of religious texts such as 1 Samuel and the Gospel of Mark." (Publisher description)
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"¿Quiénes nos representan en los medios? ¿Cómo lo hacen? ¿Qué efectos pueden producir esas representaciones? Estas y otras preguntas se responden a través de esta brillante invetigación, focalizada particularmente en la representación de "lo cholo" y "lo mestizo", en la cobertura de la fies
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ta popular del "Gran Poder", en la prensa escrita boliviana a lo largo de casi 100 años." (Cubierta del libro)
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"El trabajo describe y analiza la diversidad de prácticas religiosas de habitantes de villas de Buenos Aires. Se basa en datos agregados relevados con un cuestionario aplicado a una muestra representativa de residentes de estos territorios. Se presenta primero una discusión sobre el concepto de re
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ligiosidad popular del que surge la aproximación al de prácticas religiosas que guía el análisis. Presentamos luego la incidencia y característica de dieciocho prácticas, comparando, donde es posible, con datos del Atlas de las creencias religiosas coordinado por Mallimaci (2013). Ahondamos con mayor profundidad en algunas de ellas: la de efectuar una promesa y la de tener altares en espacios domésticos; exploramos asimismo el peso de los medios de comunicación e internet como espacios que sostienen algunas prácticas y su incidencia en la ruptura con la identidad territorial de estos pobladores. Finalizamos analizando la autopercepción sobre el grado de práctica y su cambio a lo largo del tiempo, concluyendo que esta pareciera mantenerse estable y conformándose como una dimensión que acompaña «naturalmente» sus vidas. Los interrogantes del trabajo son: ¿cuáles son y qué características tienen las prácticas religiosas? ¿Qué expresan? ¿Qué vinculación tienen con los marcos institucionales religiosos? ¿Cómo se vinculan con los territorios en los que habitan? ¿Cuál es la vinculación entre prácticas y vivencias religiosas?" (Resumen)
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"The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Popular Music is the first comprehensive analysis of the most important themes and concepts in this field. Drawing on contemporary research from religious studies, theology, sociology, ethnography, and cultural studies, the volume comprises thirty-one specifi
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cally commissioned essays from a team of international experts. The chapters explore the principal areas of inquiry and point to new directions for scholarship. Featuring chapters on methodology, key genres, religious traditions and popular music subcultures, this volume provides the essential reference point for anyone with an interest in religion and popular music as well as popular culture more broadly. Religious traditions covered include Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Paganism and occultism. Coverage of genres and religion ranges from heavy metal, rap and hip hop to country music and film and television music." (Publisher description)
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"This book explores historical and cultural aspects of modern and contemporary Bengal through the performance-centred study of a particular repertoire: the songs of the saint-composer Bhaba Pagla (1902-1984), who is particularly revered among Baul and Fakir singers. The author shows how songs, if ex
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amined as 'sacred scriptures', represent multi-dimensional texts for the study of South Asian religions. Revealing how previous studies about Bauls mirror the history of folkloristics in Bengal, this book presents sacred songs as a precious symbolic capital for a marginalized community of dislocated and unorthodox Hindus, who consider the practice of singing in itself an integral part of the path towards self-realization." (Publisher description)
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"Religion and popular culture is a fast-growing field that spans a variety of disciplines. This volume offers the first real survey of the field to date and provides a guide for the work of future scholars. It explores: "key issues of definition and of methodology, religious encounters with popular
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culture across media, material culture and space, ranging from videogames and social networks to cooking and kitsch, architecture and national monuments, representations of religious traditions in the media and popular culture, including important non-Western spheres such as Bollywood." (Publisher description)
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