Media Theory, Religion and Theology

Author: Jim Bakker
ISBN: 9780785271369
Pages: 512
Summary: The loss of Jim Bakker's empire, his money, his home, and his reputation in the two years leading up to his imprisonment in 1989 was only the beginning. In prison, he was to lose even more - his freedom, his sanity, his dignity, his confidence in his faith, and eventually even his wife. Inmate 07407-058, one-time confidant to presidents, had hit bottom. Jim Bakker was wrong about many things. Exactly what they were and how he came to confess them will surprise and inspire you. This is his story.

Author: Jaroslav Pelikan
ISBN: 9780300072686
Pages: 264
Summary: Jaroslav Pellikan, as usual, brings great scholarship and interdisciplinary background to his theological statements. This illustrated version to his celebrated Jesus through the Centuries invites the reader to reflect on the ways humanity through the centuries had understood the person and message of Jesus of Nazareth. Pellikan's original text is condensed to give way to magnificent works of art that reflects faithfully the christological views of theologians, and artists through time. Pellikan tries his best to use models from the Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant theologies. This is not a substitute to the original book, but it gives the reader an opportunity to reflect, through words and images, on how the person and message of Christ had been perceived throughout history.

Author: Gabriele Finaldi
ISBN: 9780300083651
Pages: 208
Summary: Christ is readily recognizable to us in all sorts of images, in painting, sculpture, film and illustration; his likeness is familiar, and yet the Gospels and the early Christian texts do not provide any information about his appearance. This book explores how the challenge of representing Christ has been confronted. How do you represent someone who is both God and man, both human and divine, immortal, but with a mortal body? Every act of representing Christ requires a choice about what kind of Christ one wants to show. Every image is laden with assumptions about who Christ is. The making of the image of Christ becomes a statement of belief, a sort of visual theology.

Author: Steve Turner
ISBN: 9780830822911
Pages: 131
Summary: Imagine art that is risky, complex and subtle! Imagine music, movies, books and paintings of the highest quality! Imagine art that permeates society, challenging conventional thinking and standard morals to their core! Imagine that it is all created by Christians! This is the bold vision of Steve Turner, someone who has worked among artists--many Christian and many not--for three decades. He believes Christians should confront society and the church with the powerful impact art can convey. He believes art can faithfully chronicle the lives of ordinary people and equally express the transcendence of God. He believes that Christians should be involved in every level of the art world and in every media. Yet art and artists have not always been held in high esteem by conservative Christians. Art rarely seems to communicate clear propositional truth, rarely deals with certainties and absolutes. And the lifestyles of artists too frequently seem at odds with the gospel. So the arts have often been discouraged among Christians. Throughout this stimulating book, however, Turner builds a compelling case against such a perspective. He shows that if Jesus is Lord of all of life and creation, then art is not out of bounds for Christians. Rather it can and should be a way of expressing faith in creatively, beautifully, truthfully arranged words, sounds and sights. This stirring call is must reading for every Christian who has been drawn to the arts or been influenced by them. Features & Benefits
* a fresh and positive perspective on Christianity and the arts
* shows how art can faithfully represent both "real life" and divine truth
* challenges common Christian objections to the arts
* encourages Christians to be involved in every level of the art world and in every media
* written by a poet and journalist well-known in the popular music scene

Author: Lloyd Baugh
ISBN: 9781556128639
Pages: 337
Summary: Baugh traces the development of the Jesus-film and through critical film and theological analysis show us the limitations of this genre. Baugh analyzes several important and often prize-winning films showing how each film-maker has created a valid and often complex and challenging metaphor of the Christ-event. He questions many of the traditional approaches to religious film, and offers a new approach and new criteria for the appreciation and judgment of these films.

Author: Johanna Sumiala-seppanen
ISBN: 9789189471344
Pages: 274
Summary:

Author: Richard S Wurman
ISBN: 9780789724106
Pages: 350
Summary: I am taking the unusual step of rating this book "1 star" to express my extremely high level of dissatisfaction at its quality and usefullness. There is no question that Richard Saul Wurman is a highly gifted individual, and his ACCESS books are fabulous. But this poorly-edited, disorganized book fails to capture or convey any of the insights that went into that or other successful Wurman projects.
My guess is that this project was conceived as a quickie update to the original Information Anxiety to take advantage of Internet mania, and as such much of the work was delegated to others, but without sufficient review and editing. (There are too many editing mistakes to list here, but suffice it to say that probably few books have a misspelling in the Table Of Contents as this one does -- "Informatgion" instead of "Information".)
RSW tells us that it's important to always start off with what the question is. Problem is, he doesn't follow his own advice in that book. He careens uncontrollably from gushy predictions about the future, to cataclysmic warnings of information deluge, to superficial suggestions on software and web design, to facile pop management advice, The only thread connecting all these disjointed pieces is that he strictly limits himself to talking about how important something or other is, without ever giving specific advice about how to approach it.
I am personally interested in the field of localization and globalization. So naturally I was curious as to what insight RSW brought to this area. What I found was a single, lonely page on the topic, with a few lines of simplistic patter, and a strange, unexplained diagram of various fountain pens with country names associated with each.
I am also interested in the combination of text and graphics to present information and in fact bought this book thinking it might have some insights in that regards. So I was quite happy to see in the Table of Contents a section Design in the Digital Age, summarized as "In this Digital Age we need to focus on the connections among all design elements: medium, words, pictures, and sound." Alas, true to form, all the section in question does is repeat that we need to focus on this, with no clue as how we might actually do that, nor a single example in sight. To get an idea of the poor editing quality of this book, consider the following paragraph from this section:
"Where words meet pictures meet sound creates understanding. Are you a value-based organization? A service-based organization? A quality-based organization? Are you all three? We test communication by conveying a message and having the recipient understand it, be interested in it, and remember it. Any other measure is unimportant and invalid." Does anyone else wonder how the stuff about organizations fits in here? It's just random cut-and-paste content that accidentally found its way here, never to receive the benefit of the editor's pen. Signs of rampant cut-and-pasting abound throughout the book.
Although not really the fault of the author(s), the book is also seriously dated, having come out while there was still some degree of dot-com mania going on (although the peak was passed). So you can read this book on sort of an archaeological level, to recall all the bizarre things people were saying back in those heady days. Internet refrigerators, anyone?
I probably don't need to summarize; let me simply say you are best off spending your time and money on virtually any book on this topic besides this one.

Author: Steven A. Johnson
ISBN: 9780465036806
Pages: 272
Summary: Drawing on his own expertise in the humanities and on the Web, Steven Johnson not only demonstrates how interfaces - those buttons, graphics, and words on the computer screen through which we control information - influence our daily lives, but also tracks their roots back to Victorian novels, early cinema, and even medieval urban planning. The result is a lush cultural and historical tableau in which today’s interfaces take their rightful place in the lineage of artistic innovation. With a distinctively accessible style, "Interface Culture" brings new intellectual depth to the vital discussion of how technology has transformed society, and is sure to provoke wide debate in both literary and technological circles.

Author: Charles J. Glasser Jr.
ISBN: 9781576603246
Pages: 452
Summary: The first edition of this invaluable guide for media professionals was lauded internationally on media websites, in academic journals, and at seminars and panels. Now, Glasser has worked again with top media lawyers (many from the first edtion, but with new contributors analyzing countries new to the book) to create an up-to-date resource. This paperback edition is just over half the price of the original hardcover making it more affordable for journalists, bloggers, and students.

Author: Craig Detweiler
ISBN: 9780801035920
Pages: 320
Summary: In this book, Craig Detweiler examines forty-five films from the twenty-first century that resonate theologically--from The Lord of the Rings trilogy to Little Miss Sunshine--offering groundbreaking insight into their scriptural connections and theological applications. Detweiler writes with the eye of a filmmaker, leads Hollywood and religion initiatives at Fuller Seminary, and even came to faith through cinema. In this book, he unpacks the "theology of everyday life," exploring the Spirit of God in creation, redemption, and "general revelation" through sometimes unlikely filmmakers. It's the first authoritative book that dissects up-to-date movies selected by the popular Internet Movie Database. This book is recommended for teachers, students, pastors, film fans, and those interested in the intersection of Christianity and culture.

Author: Irving M. Copi, Carl Cohen
ISBN: 9780131898349
Pages: 683
Summary: Logic is not just for Spock; deduction (which, if you read this book, you'll discover is rather different) is not just for Sherlock Holmes. Many if not most students of philosophy over the past 50 years have had their beginning logic training from an edition of this book, 'Introduction to Logic' by Irving M. Copi, now in its twelfth edition, also now with a co-author listed, Carl Cohen.



I first learned logic in a two-semester sequence through the philosophy department at my university from the fifth edition of Copi's text in the early 1980s, supplemented by other material from Copi and a few others on symbolic logic. Logic was required of philosophy majors; it was strongly recommended of majors in sciences and mathematics; it was preferred for students in social sciences. Indeed, the principles of logic contained in Copi's text would not be out of place in most any discipline.



This introductory text is also recommended reading for those preparing for major placement examinations, such as the LSAT and the MCAT. Learning how to think, and recognising typical and non-so-typical flaws in argumentation and reasoning are vital in many professions; the applications for law and medicine are fairly clear.



This new twelfth edition of the text includes a lot of extras, including LogicNotes with Practice Problems, which occasionally comes bundled with the text. The Overviews, marginalia with definitions and clarifications, and Visual Logic features are all things I wish I'd had in the earlier text I used.



The text is divided into different sections, including Language, Induction, and Deduction. Each part is then subdivided into two parts, A and B (logical, isn't it?). Language issues look at aspects such as definitions, informal fallacies in language, the question of meaning, truth and validity, and how to recognise argument forms. Deduction, what Sherlock Holmes always claims to be engaging, is a method whereby the validity of the premises provide the truth of the conclusion. In fact, Holmes usually engages in Inductive reasoning, including arguments by analogy and establishing probabilities, but not certainties. Also, the first two chapters are now separated out to introduce key concepts earlier and more directly.



This book beyond the introductory chapters on language arguments engages in symbolic logic -- rather like mathematics, it uses non-linguistic tools to work out the framework. The pieces of symbolic logic (fairly standard across the discipline, like mathematics) are introduced in various stages as inductive and deductive reasoning are developed. Copi and Cohen look at both classical and modern symbolic logic systems.



Copi and Cohen look at real-life applications, particularly as logic relates to scientific reasoning and social science reasoning. While this is not a mathematics text, it introduces some elements useful in mathematics, particularly in probability and in elements used in statistical reasoning.



This text can be used for self-study, as some of the exercises are worked out in the back. There are also study guides available that have been produced for earlier editions; they are nonetheless useful, as much of the material remains the same from one edition to another.



A great text!

Author: Domini Strinati
ISBN: 9780415235006
Pages: 304
Summary: "An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture" is widely recognised as an immensely useful textbook for students taking courses in the major theories of popular culture. Dominic Strinati provides a critical assessment of the ways in which theorists have tried to understand and evaluate popular culture in modern societies. Among the theories and ideas the book introduces are mann culture, the Frankfurt School and the culture industry, semiology and structuralism, Marxism, feminism, postmodernism and cultural populism. This new edition provides fresh material on Marxism and feminism, while a new final chapter assesses the significance of the theories explained in the book.