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Media Theory, Religion and Theology
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Total number of titles: 317
The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light
Author: Tom Harpur
ISBN: 9780802714497
Pages: 260
Summary: A provocative argument for a mystical, rather than historical, understanding of Jesus, leading to a radical rebirth of Christianity in our time.
For forty years, scholar and religious commentator Tom Harpur has challenged church orthodoxy and guided thousands of readers on subjects as controversial as the true nature of Christ and life after death. Now, in his most radical and groundbreaking work, Harpur digs deep into the origins of Christianity.
Long before the advent of Jesus Christ, the Egyptians and other peoples believed in the coming of a messiah, a virgin birth, a madonna and her child, and the incarnation of the spirit in flesh. While the early Christian church accepted these ancient truths as the very basis of Christianity, it disavowed their origins. What had begun as a universal belief system built on myth and allegory was transformed, by the third and fourth centuries A.D., into a ritualistic institution based on a literal interpretation of myths and symbols. But, as Tom Harpur argues in "The Pagan Christ", "to take the Gospels literally as history or biography is to utterly miss their inner spiritual meaning."
At a time of religious extremism, Tom Harpur reveals the virtue of a cosmic faith based on ancient truths that the modern church has renounced. His message is clear: Our blind faith in literalism is killing Christianity. Only with a return to an inclusive religion where Christ lives within each of us will we gain a true understanding of who we are and who we are intended to become. "The Pagan Christ "is a book of rare insight and power that will reilluminate the Bible and change the way we think about religion.
Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America
Author: Martin E. Marty
ISBN: 9780140082685
Pages: 512
Summary: For a highly readable and engaging history of religion in America, you can't get much better than Marty. "Pilgrims" is the work of an accomplished scholar who knows how to write history as it should be: an ongoing drama filled with interesting characters moved by varying motivations. All historians, however, let their personal worldviews slip onto the page, and this is the only complaint that I have about Marty. As a liberal Protestant theologian and historian he has a tendency to discredit evangelical theology. This is not so much of a problem when he deals with the great evangelicals of previous centuries (the Francis Asburys and the Jonathan Edwards, for example), but as he approaches the twentieth century he clearly favors the theology of, say, Reinhold Niebuhr or Walter Rauschenbusch over the conversion theology of Billy Graham (perhaps he thinks Jesus' statement that, "you must be born again," applies only to conservative politicians?). This is a minor quibble, however, and one that is to be expected. Marty paints the picture of American religious life as a vivid panorama of people and movements committed, in their own way, to that particularly American brand of the human search for God.
The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company
Author: David A. Price
ISBN: 9780307265753
Pages: 304
Summary: Product Description The roller-coaster rags-to-riches story behind the phenomenal success of Pixar Animation Studios: the first in-depth look at the company that forever changed the film industry and the "fraternity of geeks" who shaped it. "The Pixar Touch" is a story of technical innovation that revolutionized animation, transforming hand-drawn cel animation to computer-generated 3-D graphics. It’s a triumphant business story of a company that began with a dream, remained true to the ideals of its founders—antibureaucratic and artist driven—and ended up a multibillion-dollar success. We meet Pixar’s technical genius and founding CEO, Ed Catmull, who dreamed of becoming an animator, inspired by Disney’s "Peter Pan" and "Pinocchio", realized he would never be good enough, and instead enrolled in the then new field of computer science at the University of Utah. It was Catmull who founded the computer graphics lab at the New York Institute of Technology and who wound up at Lucasfilm during the first "Star Wars" trilogy, running the computer graphics department, and found a patron in Steve Jobs, just ousted from Apple Computer, who bought Pixar for five million dollars. Catmull went on to win four Academy Awards for his technical feats and helped to create some of the key computer-generated imagery software that animators rely on today. Price also writes about John Lasseter, who catapulted himself from unemployed animator to one of the most powerful figures in American filmmaking; animation was the only thing he ever wanted to do (he was inspired by Disney’s "The Sword in the Stone"), and Price’s book shows how Lasseter transformed computer animation from a novelty into an art form. The author writes as well about Steve Jobs, as volatile a figure as a Shakespearean monarch . . . Based on interviews with dozens of insiders, "The Pixar Touch" examines the early wildcat years when computer animation was thought of as the lunatic fringe of the medium. We see the studio at work today; how its writers, directors, and animators make their astonishing, and astonishingly popular, films. The book also delves into Pixar’s corporate feuds: between Lasseter and his former champion, Jeffrey Katzenberg ("A Bug’s Life" vs. "Antz"), and between Jobs and Michael Eisner. And finally it explores Pixar’s complex relationship with the Walt Disney Company as it transformed itself from a Disney satellite into the $7.4 billion jewel in the Disney crown. Little-Known Facts from "The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company" by David Price • Pixar, not Apple, made Steve Jobs a billionaire. Jobs bought Pixar in 1986 from Lucasfilm for $5 million. In 1995, the week after the release of "Toy Story", Pixar went public and Jobs’s stock was worth $1.1 "billion". • Ed Catmull, Pixar’s co-founder, dreamed as a youth of becoming an animator, but decided in high school that he couldn’t draw well enough. Instead, he became an early visionary of computer animation as a graduate student in the 1970’s. "Computer animation was sort of on the lunatic fringe at that time," remembered Fred Parke, a fellow Ph.D. student in Catmull’s class at the University of Utah. • When John Lasseter joined Pixar—which was then the computer graphics department of George Lucas’s Lucasfilm—he had just been fired from his dream job as an animator at Disney. He became the first person to apply classic Disney character animation principles to computer animation. • Before it became an animation studio, Pixar went through years of struggle and multi-million-dollar losses. It started as a computer company and John Lasseter’s short films, such as "Luxo Jr." and "Tin Toy", were promotional films to help sell the company’s computers. • Pixar was almost bought by…Microsoft? Yep: Jobs remained worried about the company’s finances even after Pixar made a deal with the Walt Disney Co. in 1991 to produce "Toy Story", Pixar’s first feature film. "The Pixar Touch" details the effort to sell Pixar to Bill Gates’s company while "Toy Story" was in production. • When writing "Toy Story", to find inspiration for the relationship between Buzz and Woody, Lasseter and his story department screened classic "buddy" movies, including "48 Hrs.", "The Defiant Ones", "Midnight Run", and "Thelma & Louise". • John Lasseter has instilled an intense commitment to research in the studio’s creative staff. To prepare for the scene in "Finding Nemo" in which the fish characters Marlin and Dory become trapped in a whale, two members of the art department climbed inside a dead gray whale that had been stranded north of Marin, California. • To learn how to make a realistic French kitchen, the producer and first director of "Ratatouille" worked as apprentices at an elite French restaurant in the Napa Valley. • Pixar deliberately avoided making the humans in "The Incredibles" look too realistic. They knew that as animated human characters became too close to lifelike, audiences would actually perceive them as repulsive. The phenomenon, known as the "uncanny valley," had been predicted by a Japanese robotics researcher as early as 1970. Thus, the details of human skin, such as pores and hair follicles, were left out of "The Incredibles"’ characters in favor of a more cartoonlike appearance. • The signature of most Pixar feature films is characters who appeal to children (toys, fish, monsters…), but who have adult-like personalities and are dealing with adult-like problems. • Prior to the acquisition of Pixar by Disney in 2006, Lasseter loathed the idea of Disney making sequels to Pixar films without Pixar’s involvement—as Disney’s contract with Pixar allowed it to do. "These were the people that put out "Cinderella II"," Lasseter remarked. • Pixar is more than an animation studio. Pixar’s innovations in computer graphics technology pervade movies today. Special-effects houses like Industrial Light & Magic ("Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest", "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe", "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix") use Pixar’s software to create out-of-this-world places and characters. (Photo © Simon Bruty)
Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar . . .: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes
Author: Thomas Cathcart, Daniel Klein
ISBN: 9780143113874
Pages: 224
Summary: This New York Times bestseller is the hilarious philosophy course everyone wishes they’d had in school
Outrageously funny, "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar" . . . has been a breakout bestseller ever since authors—and born vaudevillians—Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein did their schtick on NPR’s "Weekend Edition". Lively, original, and powerfully informative, "Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar" . . . is a not-so-reverent crash course through the great philosophical thinkers and traditions, from Existentialism ("What do Hegel and Bette Midler have in common?") to Logic ("Sherlock Holmes never deduced anything"). Philosophy 101 for those who like to take the heavy stuff lightly, this is a joy to read—and finally, it all makes sense!
Pop Goes the Church: Should the Church Engage Pop Culture?
Author: Tim Stevens
ISBN: 9780979017490
Pages: 256
Summary: Whether you're a regular attender, a leader, or have yet to step foot in a church, you may have questions about church that aren't being answered. How can the church remain relevant while communicating the unchanging integrity of God's truth? Author Tim Stevens makes an inspiring case for leveraging pop culture to reach out to people in the language of their lives. He offers a new perspective that gives relevance and impact to the church by using pop culture meeting people in the real world with words, sounds and images that speak to them. He encourages us to get out of our comfort zones and look people in the eyes, meeting them wherever they are, relating to their problems and society's challenges--even celebrating pop culture, where there are exciting signs of spiritual seeking. Pop Goes the Church will open your mind to church in a way that breaks down walls, engages the culture and speaks to a generation that needs to hear good news.
The Post-American World
Author: Fareed Zakaria
ISBN: 9780393062359
Pages: 288
Summary: A Prophetic Assessment of America's Changing Place in an Increasingly Global Age
For Fareed Zakaria, the great story of our times is not the decline of America but rather the rise of everyone else -- the growth of countries such as China, India, Brazil, Russia, South Africa, Kenya, and many, many more. This economic growth is generating a new global landscape where power is shifting and wealth and innovation are bubbling up in unexpected places. It's also producing political confidence and national pride. As these trends continue, the push of globalization will increasingly be joined by the pull of nationalism -- a tension that is likely to define the next decades.
With his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination, Zakaria draws on lessons from the two great power shifts of the past five hundred years -- the rise of the Western world and the rise of the United States -- to tell us what we can expect from the third shift, the "rise of the rest." Washington must begin a serious transformation of global strategy and seek to share power, create coalitions, build legitimacy, and define the global agenda. None of this will be easy for the greatest power the world has ever known -- the only power that for so long has really mattered. But all that is changing now. The future we face is the post-American world.
Postmodern Media Culture
Author: Jonathan Bignell
ISBN: 9780748609888
Pages: 224
Summary: This book analyzes the function of media examples in the work of a number of key theorists -- including Adorno, Baudrillard, Benjamin, Habermas, Jameson, Lyotard, and McLuhan -- and discusses contemporary media production, products, and audiences, to test and reorient theoretical models of the postmodern. The book deals with film, television, information technology, consumer products, and popular literature and assesses challenges to conceptions of the postmodern based on gender, race, and region.
The Practice of Everyday Life
Author: Michel De Certeau
ISBN: 9780520236998
Pages: 260
Summary: Michel de Certeau considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior are put by individuals and groups, describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture. In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws brilliantly on an immense theoretical literature in analytic philosophy, linguistics, sociology, semiology, and anthropology--to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature.
Preaching as Art: Biblical Storytelling for a Media Generation
Author: Darius Salter
ISBN: 9780834123595
Pages: 192
Summary: Today's postmodern world prefers mystery over logic, impression over rationale, aesthetic beauty over practicality, and symbolism over obvious answers. We live in an art-enriched, art-minded world.
For ministers, this rebirth of creativity and imagination opens the door for exciting possibilities. Scripture itself is an art form. The story of our Christian faith is woven together with the mystery, imagination, creativity, and beauty that characterize the very mind of God. No other book contains more murder plots, love stories, betrayals, adulterous affairs, heroic feats, tragedies, triumphs, and redemptive endings than the Bible.
Preaching as Art challenges pastors and speakers to use the Bible and its colorful imagery and literary brilliance to celebrate God's amazing story. It encourages preachers to invite their listeners to dialogue with them, to experience the Bible stories as they are being told, and by doing so participate in the very nature and image of God. Author Darius Salter provides practical ideas, sermon illustrations, examples, and a variety of media options to help speakers enrich and transform their messages into art forms that will lead listeners to appreciate the artistry of Scripture and encounter God as never before.
A Primer on Postmodernism
Author: Stanley J. Grenz
ISBN: 9780802808646
Pages: 199
Summary: Grenz examines the topography of postmodernism, a phenomenon everyone acknowledges, but has difficulty describing with precision. Of particular significance is his discussion of the challenges this cultural shift presents to the church.
The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the Twenty-First Century
Author: Robert Mcchesney
ISBN: 9781583671054
Pages: 352
Summary: Praise for Robert W. McChesney
"Robert McChesney's work has been of extraordinary importance. . . . It should be read with care and concern by people who care about freedom and basic rights."
—Noam Chomsky
"Robert McChesney is one of the nation's most important analysts of the media."
—Howard Zinn
The symptoms of the crisis of the U.S. media are well-known—a decline in hard news, the growth of info-tainment and advertorials, staff cuts and concentration of ownership, increasing conformity of viewpoint and suppression of genuine debate. McChesney's new book, The Problem of the Media, gets to the roots of this crisis, explains it, and points a way forward for the growing media reform movement.
Moving consistently from critique to action, the book explores the political economy of the media, illuminating its major flashpoints and controversies by locating them in the political economy of U.S. capitalism. It deals with issues such as the declining quality of journalism, the question of bias, the weakness of the public broadcasting sector, and the limits and possibilities of antitrust legislation in regulating the media. It points out the ways in which the existing media system has become a threat to democracy, and shows how it could be made to serve the interests of the majority.
McChesney's "Rich Media, Poor Democracy" was hailed as a pioneering analysis of the way in which media had come to serve the interests of corporate profit rather than public enlightenment and debate. Bill Moyers commented, "If Thomas Paine were around, he would have written this book." The Problem of the Media is certain to be a landmark in media studies, a vital resource for media activism, and essential reading for concerned scholars and citizens everywhere.
Propaganda
Author: Edward Bernays
ISBN: 9780970312594
Pages: 175
Summary: "Bernays' honest and practical manual provides much insight into some of the most powerful and influential institutions of contemporary industrial state capitalist democracies."-Noam Chomsky
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."-Edward Bernays, "Propaganda"
A seminal and controversial figure in the history of political thought and public relations, Edward Bernays (18911995), pioneered the scientific technique of shaping and manipulating public opinion, which he famously dubbed "engineering of consent." During World War I, he was an integral part of the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI), a powerful propaganda apparatus that was mobilized to package, advertise and sell the war to the American people as one that would "Make the World Safe for Democracy." The CPI would become the blueprint in which marketing strategies for future wars would be based upon.
Bernays applied the techniques he had learned in the CPI and, incorporating some of the ideas of Walter Lipmann, became an outspoken proponent of propaganda as a tool for democratic and corporate manipulation of the population. His 1928 bombshell "Propaganda" lays out his eerily prescient vision for using propaganda to regiment the collective mind in a variety of areas, including government, politics, art, science and education. To read this book today is to frightfully comprehend what our contemporary institutions of government and business have become in regards to organized manipulation of the masses.
This is the first reprint of "Propaganda" in over 30 years and features an introduction by Mark Crispin Miller, author of "The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder".
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: and Other Writings
Author: Peter Baehr
ISBN: 9780140439212
Pages: 464
Summary: In The Protestant Ethic, Max Weber opposes the Marxist concept of dialectical materialism and relates the rise of the capitalist economy to the Calvinist belief in the moral value of hard work and the fulfillment of one's worldly duties. Based on the original 1905 edition, this volume includes, along with Weber's treatise, an illuminating introduction, a wealth of explanatory notes, and exemplary responses and remarks-both from Weber and his critics-sparked by publication of "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism".
This is the first English translation of the 1905 German text and the first volume to include Weber's unexpurgated responses to his critics, which reveal important developments in and clarifications of Weber's argument.
A Purple State of Mind: Finding Middle Ground in a Divided Culture
Author: Craig Detweiler
ISBN: 9780736924603
Pages: 240
Summary: Our culture is reeling from divisiveness and strife. People are divided politically (into red and blue states), morally, and spiritually. Successful author and Hollywood filmmaker Craig Detweiler reveals how to be a “purple” Christian—a follower of Christ who finds middle ground, not to compromise but to converse. He empowers readers to build relationships rather than erect barriers so they can more effectively communicate and live out the good news. This relevant and practical guide reveals ways to... communicate the gospel with humility promote prolife and pro–family positions in a pluralistic society love members of the gay community relate to people in other faith traditions
The Christian community has become known for what it opposes rather than what it proposes—faith, hope, and love. "A Purple State of Mind" dismantles unhelpful misrepresentations of Jesus’ life–giving message and presents it in a fresh, contemporary way.