"Each of the eleven chapters in Quoting God pairs an academic and a journalist. First, the scholar holds forth, followed by a "View from the News Desk." Together, they represent many and diverse voices. Badaracco's book shows the relationship between media culture and spiritual culture, recognizing how news and religious values influence political life, and how science, modernity, and disbelief come together to suggest social fragmentation or consolidation. Through the media, audiences learn, often with passion, what they believe, what they resist religiously, how to respect other religious ideas, and how to construct their own religious identity in a world of both mediated and actual communities. The book's conceptual and theoretical frame addresses emerging religions as well as traditional faiths. The first four chapters focus on the legal and constitutional frames informing national identity and the ideological climates of newsrooms where journalists "construct the mediated religious public square" (Page 14). The next four chapters discuss cross-cultural reporting in which a reporter navigates between two (or more) cultures in the required roles of being fair and balanced. The next three chapters explore faith and reason, science and religion, and the complexity of religious issues. The volume concludes with Gustav Niebuhr, formerly with the New York Times and now a member of the academy at Syracuse University, summing up the care and commitment of the journalist who covers religion in American life." (https://www.h-net.org/reviews)
Introduction: Quotation and the life of public texts / Claire Hoertz Badaracco
1 Journalism and the religious imagination / John Schmalzbauer
2 God talk in the public square / C. Welton Gaddy
3 The first amendment and the Falun Gong / Paul Moses
4 A framework for understanding fundamentalism / Rebecca Moore
5 Biblical prophecy and foreign policy / Paul S. Boyer
6 Last words : death and public self-expression / John P. Ferré
7 Collective memory, national identity: victims and victimizers in Japan / Richard A. Gardner
8 Appalachian regional identity in national media / Howard Dorgan
9 The Virgin of Guadalupe as cultural icon / Virgilio Elizondo
10 Reporting complexity: science and religion / Jame Schaefer
11 Vatican opinion on modern communication / Paul Soukup
Conclusion: A relationship of overlapping conversations / Gustav Niebuhr