Sociology of Religion
Asep Iqbal
Religion and Media, Religious Media, or Media Religion: Theoretical Studies
S. H. Hosseini
Major efforts have been exhausted bringing religion closer to media (rather than bringing media closer to religion), or to break down the traditional boundaries between the “religious” and the “media.”
In light of such efforts and various research, some have tried to show the necessity of building new bridges between religion and media. These attempts have even made scholars believe that in the “media age,” the secular is sacred and the sacred is secular.
This endeavor was aimed at the unification of the two important elements of contemporary human life, which historically could also be understood in the context of challenging the relationship between science and religion.
In this paper, I have tried to classify the various theories and approaches about the essence of the media in three branches: functionalistic, essentialist, and interactive hypotheses. After a short review of the consequences of each theory's compatibility or incompatibility with media, religion, and religious teachings, I demonstrate that a more fundamental step should be taken to combine religion and media in an era known as the “Global,” “Religious,” or “Media Age.”
The other part of the paper is devoted to the necessary distinction between religious media and mediated religion, emphasizing the main characteristics of religious media theory. Although the basic principle of media essentialism has been accepted, religion, which is neither the institutional ministry nor an absolute personal experience, has the potential to be consistent with the exclusive nature of the media.
The final part of the article points to the focal axis of the religious media hypothesis within which elements of religion, culture, globalization, and the media are balanced and stabilized. This is religious pluralism.
Read more: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15348420701838350#preview
Religion and Media
Edited by Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber
The latter part of the twentieth century saw an explosion of new media that effected profound changes in human categories of communication. At the same time, a "return to religion" occurred on a global scale. The twenty-five contributors to this volume—who include such influential thinkers as Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Talal Asad, and James Siegel—confront the conceptual, analytical, and empirical difficulties involved in addressing the complex relationship between religion and media.
The book's introductory section offers a prolegomenon to the multiple problems raised by an interdisciplinary approach to these multifaceted phenomena.
The essays in the following part provide exemplary approaches to the historical and systematic background to the study of religion and media, ranging from the biblical prohibition of images and its modern counterparts, through theological discussion of imagery in Ignatius and Luther, to recent investigations into icons and images that "think" in Jean-Luc Marion and Gilles Deleuze.
The third part presents case studies by anthropologists and scholars of comparative religion who deal with religion and media in Indonesia, India, Japan, South Africa, Venezuela, Iran, Poland, Turkey, present-day Germany, and Australia.
The book concludes with two remarkable documents: a chapter from Theodor W. Adorno's study of the relationship between religion and media in the context of political agitation (The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas' Radio Addresses) and a section from Niklas Luhmann's monumental Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Society as a Social System).
Read more: http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=1316