"This article considers recent changes in the definition of religion and of media as the basis for framing the study of their relation to one another and recent research in the intersection they have come to form over the last two decades or so. The history, materiality, and reception of each have c ... olored scholarly work, and made ethnography, practice, material culture, and embodiment key aspects of scholarship. A new paradigm for some scholars for studying mediation is aesthetics—no longer understood as the ‘‘philosophy of the beautiful,’’ but as the study of perception in the mediated practices that make up lived religion." (Abstract) more

"The list of critical terms selected and explicated in this book will signal many things to readers. It will certainly indicate that the study of media and religion is broadly interdisciplinary. Before the 1980s, the field, if it even was one, was largely the domain of historians of Christianity, Ch ... ristian communicators, and seminary professors, geared toward the improvement of church communication policy and practice, education, evangelism, and preaching. Matters have changed since then. Though religious organizations scholarship has explored the subject. Anthropology, cultural studies, media studies, visual and material culture, film studies, and religious studies are among the next generation of disciplines drawn to the study of media and religion. The new paradigm that this book articulates has described itself under a triad of terms: religion, media, and culture. What the third term means will be considered in detail in the Introduction here and in several of the Key Word essays. For the time being, it is important to say that the religion, media, and culture approach is not limited to the tendency to focus on journalism and communication policy, which is the legacy of the older practice. The aim here is not to dismiss or ignore them but to expand the remit and to change some key assumptions about what “religion” and “media” are in academic study. The difference turns on the third term, culture. The dominant approach taken here is constructivist in nature." (Preface, page xii-xiii) more