Einstein, Mara. (2008) Brands of Faith: Marketing Religion in a Commercial Age. New York: Routlegde

摘要

Nearly half of all American adults have switched their religious affiliation since childhood according to a recent poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. We live in an age of choice and access in which the public sphere is constituted by ubiquitous media and countless religious options. This age demands a study of religion that adapts to unprecedented religious switching. Thus contend Brands of Faith: Marketing Religion in a Commercial Age by Mara Einstein and Religion in the Media Age by Stewart Hoover. Whether the "age" is of media or commerce, both texts propose approaches to the study of religion that can engage a radically new socio-historical context. Einstein writes from the discipline of Media Studies, with the backdrop of a previous career in marketing. She posits that current capitalist practice is the best way to understand contemporary religion. Brands of Faith explores how religions, understood now as products, brand themselves in the "religious marketplace" to compete for "religious shoppers." Hoover, also a scholar of Media Studies and well-known for his work at the forefront of the emerging field of Religion and Media, offers a nuanced approach to the intersection of these disciplines that looks at ways in which the individual-conceived as both consumer and producer-negotiates culture, meaning, and identity. His sociological study emphasizes media reception, comparing media and religious practice to individuals' narratives about those practices in order to understand the complex relationship between media, culture, religion and religious practitioners.