Interfolding Religion and Media

摘要

The central problem with religion and media is that neither works particularly well as an object of study. Both are terms that regularly break free of their tenuous disciplinary bounds and share the troubling tendency of interrupting the categories commonly used to analyze them. When taken together, religion and media do not tame each other but jump fields, blur, and demand a certain flexibility of vocabulary that can keep pace with the dynamic movement of these intertwined areas of inquiry. Our cultural landscapes repeatedly demonstrate the vitality of religious ways of thinking and living in a mediated world and the ways that media shape and inform religion. Some of the most productive recent scholarship insists, in fact, that religion is always mediated or even that religions are themselves media and, likewise, that religious logics cannot be extricated from the way media work (Stolow, 2005). It is the complex and diverse relationships of religion and media that this issue of the Journal of Communication Inquiry (JCI) examines, without any presumption that the terms in relationship will remain or ever were distinct.