Media Theory, Religion and Theology

Author: Diane H. Winston
ISBN:
Pages: 259
Summary: Scholars have long assumed that industrialization and the growth of modern cities signaled a decline of religious practice among urban dwellers - that urban commercial culture weakened traditional religious ties by luring the faithful away from their devotional practice. Spanning many disciplines, the essays in this volume challenge this notion of the "secular city" and examine how members of urban houses of worship invented fresh expressions of religiosity by incorporating consumer goods, popular entertainment, advertising techniques, and marketing into their spiritual lives. Faith in the Market explores phenomena from Salvation Army "slum angels" to the "race movies" of the mid-twentieth century, from Catholic teens' modest dress crusades to Black Muslim artists. The contributors - integrating gender, performance, and material culture studies into their analyses - reveal the many ways in which religious groups actually embraced commercial culture to establish an urban presence. While the city streets may have proved inhospitable to some forms of religion, many others, including evangelicism, Catholicism, and Judaism, assumed rich and complex forms as they developed in vital urban centers.

Author: Paul Rasor
ISBN: 9781558964846
Pages: 231
Summary: This innovative critical analysis of religious liberalism probes the dynamic tensions of a theology that is committed to individual freedom and autonomy on the one hand and a greater sense of community on the other. Much more than a primer, Faith Without Certainty lays out the basic characteristics of liberal theology, delving into historical and philosophical sources as well as social and intellectual roots. Clear-eyed but ultimately hopeful, Rasor explores the ambiguous and creative nature of liberal theology today. Ideal for readers who want a better understanding of liberal theology, a religious tradition that is rooted not in authority but in one's own experience and conscience.

Author: C. Lee Harrington
ISBN: 9780814731826
Pages: 432
Summary: ”One of the best aspects of the text is the way that the contributors do not merely typecast fans as those interested in modern and popular culture, but also examine fans of mediums typically considered ‘high culture.’ This makes the book much friendlier to pop-culture fans, whose practices are typically considered low-brow and fanatical when compared to someone who holds season tickets to the opera or visits an art gallery every weekend. As a fan, it’s nice to see that the behavior is not reduced to unnecessary fanaticism and is examined on a more subjective level.”
—"M/C Reviews"
"Fandom pushes the boundaries of fan studies in bold directions, incorporating high culture fandoms, global fan cultures, fan technologies, and antagonistic anti-fandom, while rethinking the core tenets of fan studies concerning aesthetics, place, intellectual property, and interpretive communities — all presented with a lively, accessible, and engaging writing style."
—Jason Mittell, Middlebury College
“If you're an avid news reader, a holder of season's tickets to the symphony, a frequenter of used bookstores, or even if you've been known to scream at referees during televised games, you're a fan. In this exciting collection, we learn about why it is that certain media narratives, images, sounds, and events engage us emotionally, and what that engagement means for us personally and in our relationships with others in the increasingly global marketplace in which we live.”
—Lynn Schofield Clark, author of" From Angels to Aliens"
“A rich compendium of theory, argument, and observation of a wide variety of types of fandom—from fans of cultural theory to fans of the Sopranos and of Chekhov, from presidents who are fans of country music to fans of the news. As the active ‘prosumers’ of the digital media’s niche markets come to be increasingly central to their operation, fan studies shows us the emerging dynamics of how the cultural industries are going to work in the future.”
—David Morley, Goldsmiths College, University of London
We are all fans. Whether we log on to Web sites to scrutinize the latest plot turns in "Lost", "stalk" our favorite celebrities on "Gawker", attend gaming conventions, or simply wait with bated breath for the newest "Harry Potter" novel-each of us is a fan. Fandom extends beyond television and film to literature, opera, sports, and pop music, and encompasses both high and low culture.
Fandom brings together leading scholars to examine fans, their practices, and their favorite texts. This unparalleled selection of original essays examines instances across the spectrum of modern cultural consumption from Karl Marx to Paris Hilton, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" to backyard wrestling, Bach fugues to Bollywood cinema¸ and nineteenth-century concert halls to computer gaming. Contributors examine fans of high cultural texts and genres, the spaces of fandom, fandom around the globe, the impact of new technologies on fandom, and the legal and historical contexts of fan activity. Fandom is key to understanding modern life in our increasingly mediated and globalized world.

Author: Eric Klinenberg
ISBN: 9780805087291
Pages: 368
Summary: An “admirably researched and lucidly written” investigation of the corporate takeover of the media—and what it means for Americans —that “should serve as a wake-up call” (Daniel Schorr, NPR) For the residents of Minot, North Dakota, Clear Channel Communications is synonymous with disaster. When a train derailment sent a cloud of poisonous gas drifting toward the small town, Minot’s fire and rescue departments attempted to use local radio to warn residents of the approaching threat. But in the age of canned programming, there was no one at the six local non-religious commercial stations, all owned by Clear Channel, to take the call. The result for the people of Minot: one death and more than a thousand injuries.
 
Opening with the story of the Minot tragedy, "Fighting for Air "takes us into the world of preprogrammed radio shows, empty television news stations, and copycat newspapers to show how expanding conglomerate ownership of all media has harmed American political and cultural life—and how malign neglect by the federal government allowed it to happen. In a call for action, "Fighting for Air "also reveals a rising generation of activists and citizen journalists who are insisting on the local coverage we need and deserve.

Author: Bob Briner
ISBN: 9780805423617
Pages: 164
Summary: In the final book of this Christian thought leader, Bob Briner takes a look at the history of Christian participation with American popular culture over the past fifty years. Briner concludes Christians have failed to be salt and light. This posthumous book is Briner's apology of sorts to a culture that desperately needs what Jesus has to offer but has had to endure a string of embarrassing behaviors in the name of Christ by those that wear the name Christian.

Author: Jody Dean
ISBN: 9780800759728
Pages: 235
Summary: This is without a doubt one of the best books I have ever read. Jody Dean is a member of my Church and Sunday School class. I have not personally met the man; but I can tell you by watching him from a distance that he is one of the most humble and caring men you would ever meet. I heard him state at a Sunday school luncheon that he was not sure if one person would buy his book. Well I bought it on 10/1/04, and could not put it down. A fantastic easy read, with fascinating stories. Great job Jody. When is your next book coming out?

Author: Kary Oberbrunner
ISBN: 9780310285458
Pages: 240
Summary: Every generation must answer the most basic ethical question of the Christian faith, “What does it mean to be in the world, but not of it?” Answering correctly yields relevance, something the world deeply desires, but rarely sees. The Fine Line re-envisions what it means to integrate Christianity with culture.

Author: Harvey Cox
ISBN: 9780306810497
Pages: 368
Summary: It was born a scant ninety-five years ago in a rundown warehouse on Azusa Street in Los Angeles. For days the religious-revival service there went on and on-and within a week the "Los Angeles Times" was reporting on a "weird babble" coming from the building. Believers were "speaking in tongues," the way they did at the first Pentecost recorded in the Bible?and a pentecostal movement was created that would, by the start of the twenty-first century, attract over 400 million followers worldwide. Harvey Cox has traveled the globe to visit and worship with pentecostal congregations on four continents, and he has written a dynamic, provocative history of this explosion of spirituality?a movement that represents no less than a tidal change in what religion is and what it means to people.

Author: Mark L. Waltz
ISBN: 9780764427572
Pages: 144
Summary: I would highly recommend this book. It provides great ideas and advice for creating a great experience for guests. After reading this book and attending a workshop at Granger Community Church, my church has started its own First Impressions ministry. It's off to a great start and there are plans to expand this ministry in the future.

Author: Shane Hipps
ISBN: 9780310293217
Pages: 208
Summary: “The methods change, but the message stays the same.” This saying is the guiding light for faithful Christians in a changing world. But author Shane Hipps reveals the error in this thinking. Instead he demonstrates how changing the methods always changes the message. He shows us the hidden power of technology to shape our faith in unexpected ways.

Author: Lynn Schofield Clark
ISBN: 9780195300239
Pages: 304
Summary: Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the Left Behind series are but the latest manifestations of American teenagers' longstanding fascination with the supernatural and the paranormal. In this groundbreaking book, Lynn Schofield Clark explores the implications of this fascination for contemporary religious and spiritual practices. Relying on stories gleaned from more than 250 in-depth interviews with teens and their families, Clark seeks to discover what today's teens really believe and why. She finds that as adherence to formal religious bodies declines, interest in alternative spiritualities as well as belief in "superstition" grow accordingly. Ironically, she argues, fundamentalist Christian alarmism about the forces of evil has also fed belief in a wider array of supernatural entities. Resisting the claim that the media "brainwash" teens, Clark argues that today's popular stories of demons, hell, and the afterlife actually have their roots in the U.S.'s religious heritage. She considers why some young people are nervous about supernatural stories in the media, while others comfortably and often unselfconsciously blur the boundaries between those stories of the realm beyond that belong to traditional religion and those offered by the entertainment media. At a time of increased religious pluralism and declining participation in formal religious institutions, Clark says, we must completely reexamine what young people mean--and what they may believe--when they identify themselves as "spiritual" or "religious." Offering provocative insights into how the entertainment media shape contemporary religious ideas and practices, From Angels to Aliens paints a surprising--and perhaps alarming--portrait of the spiritual state of America's youth.

Author: Brent Waters
ISBN: 9780754639152
Pages: 166
Summary:

Author: Anne C. Loveland, Otis B. Wheeler
ISBN: 9780826214805
Pages: 307
Summary: From Meetinghouse to Megachurch is a superb account, from the perspective of material and cultural history, of the rise of the evangelical megachurch-a church architecturally designed to attract a large following. In 1970, there were only ten megachurches. By the mid 1990s, however, megachurches numbered around four hundred, representing nearly 2 percent of the Protestant churches in the United States. In this new study, Anne C. Loveland and Otis B. Wheeler demonstrate that evangelical megachurches evolved from multiple models and influences. Lavishly illustrated with more than 150 images, From Meetinghouse to Megachurch fills a significant gap in the historiography of evangelical religion in the United States.

Author: Robert Hodgson
ISBN: 9781556129681
Pages: 379
Summary: Eighteen experts from a wide variety of academic and professional fields engage key questions in a series of thought-provoking essays that define the emerging field of new media Bible translating, and how the biblical message will be communicated in the culture and media of the 21st century.

Author: Wiley Lee Umphlett
ISBN: 9780838640807
Pages: 460
Summary: