Religion and New Media: A Uses and Gratifications Approach

This research examines specific relationships between new media and religion. While prior research has focused on the question of whether a relationship exists, we explore technology usage as a predictor of specific religious behavior. Using a sample (N = 423) comprising a cross-section of religious and cultural backgrounds, results indicate that attitudes toward technology and use of social media contribute to how people view religion as a mechanism for meeting needs. Applying uses and gratifications theory in a unique way, three needs related to religion emerged: religion as a means of passing time, religion as a mode of meeting self needs, and religion as a catalyst for learning. We discuss implications of our findings.     

All Work and All Play: Using Games to Teach Religion and Media

To help students learn the concepts, personages, and events central to a course on religion and media, students were charged with designing a board game or a card game that employed this information. They drew from required books and documentaries, which the instructor chose for breadth and inclusiveness, focusing on both print and electronic media as well as on Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The games were evaluated according to the appeal and educational value of the game design, the clarity and coherence of the written instructions, and the accuracy, significance, and comprehensiveness of the knowledge tested. The assignment helped maximize the time students spent thinking about key information in the course. It also provided the instructor with games that students in future classes can play to help them learn terms central to the study of media and religion.     

Teaching Religion and Media: Syllabi and Pedagogy

This study explores the pedagogy of Religion and Media. The topic has garnered growing attention in recent years (Stout, 2012 Stout, D. (2012). Media and religion: Foundations of an emerging field. New York, NY: Routledge. [Google Scholar]) and the sheer array of classes is a testament to its status as a lively growing topic. This study takes a nonnormative, exploratory approach to uncover four key categorical approaches to how the topic of religion and media is taught in universities. The methodology included a textual analysis of 48 syllabi and interviews with professors who teach religion and media.     

Teaching Media and Religion: Emerging Best Practices

This preface summarizes the emergence of religion and media courses from the 1950s to the present day. It makes the case for why analysis of religion and media coursework is a challenge and reports on research that shows enormous diversity among the types of courses commonly classified as within the “religion and media” subject. The preface furthermore summarizes the other articles in this special issue.     

The Culturalist Turn in Scholarship on Media and Religion

It has been suggested that one avenue for critically assessing online discourses is in their ability to sustain themselves. In this article, I argue that apocalyptic Christian discourse is highly sustainable in the online environment precisely because its argumentative norms are grounded in a profound narrative plasticity. Because the authorizing biblical texts and interpretive narrative that define this discourse exhibit a profound flexibility, new events are immediately assimilated into the narrative structure, making the discourse highly sustainable in the online environment. However, a case study analysis suggests that precisely the same qualities that allow this sustainability also allow this discourse to insulate itself from the necessarily divergent ideas that might generate more constructive public deliberation.     

Illegal Aliens,Criminals, and Hypersexual Spitfires: Latin@ Youth and Pedagogies of Citizenship in Media Texts

This article aims to broaden the ways we conceptualize citizenship and implement citizenship education in social studies. To do so, the authors explore media texts as a curricular and pedagogical site for teaching lessons about citizenship. Specifically, the authors investigate how media drafts the boundaries of citizenship for Latin@ youth, and influences how young people come to understand who is and who is not perceived as a citizen entitled to rights and freedoms. Media texts, like formal social studies curricula, are powerful and enduring educators that shape how students know the world and imagine their place in it. Therefore, this article addresses how social studies teachers can integrate media texts into the classroom to explore representations of Latin@s and the impact that media has on our citizenship identities and experiences.     

Genealogy of an Emerging Field: Foundations for the Study of Media and Religion

This study triangulated research methods to analyze how the public debate on a controversial issue was framed, and by whom, as a means of understanding the process and outcome of that debate. Its findings support the idea that public debates are framed by all involved parties, not just the news media. It also considered how the relative power position held by each side in this debate may have affected their interactions with the news media.     

Social Science and the Study of Media and Religion: Going Forward by Looking Backward

In 2001, Christian aid workers were arrested by the Taliban in Afghanistan on charges of proselytizing. A year later, Baptist hospital workers were gunned down in Yemen. In one case, the country was an enemy of the United States; in the other, the country was an ally. The way in which the proselytizing and the national government was portrayed changed from one set of news coverage to the other, suggesting that political interests, not religious ones, drive this coverage.     

Media,Religion, and Politics in Nicaragua: How an Independent Press Threatened the Catholic Church

Nicaragua's La Prensa newspaper stopped publishing a weekly Catholic "Sunday Reading" page in May 2001, replacing it with a more diverse "Religion and Faith" page. A storm of protest followed, with some religious leaders saying the church was being censored. Even Violeta Chamorro, a co-owner of La Prensa and a former Nicaraguan president, denounced the action. Although this was a simple journalistic decision to better serve the readers, the move also carried substantial political implications. La Prensa and the Catholic Church had long been aligned with the powerful economic elite and shared similar histories. Both, for example, had internal battles over whether to support the socialist Sandinista revolution, and both were struggling to hold onto their clients—readers and church members. This power struggle between an independent press and the Catholic Church illustrates their respective efforts to remain relevant to Nicaraguans. This study demonstrates that both acted rationally in support of their own best interests.     

Religion, Rationality, and Experience: A Response to the New Rational Choice Theory of Religion

This paper is a critical response to the newest version of the rational choice theory of religion (RCTR). In comparison with previous critiques, this paper takes aim at RCTR's foundational assumption of psychological egoism and argues that the thesis of psychological egoism is untenable. Without that thesis, the normative aspects of religious commitment cannot be reduced validly to instrumental reason. On neither conceptual nor empirical grounds therefore can religion or religious commitment be defined comprehensively in terms of exchange theory. With the failure of psychological egoism as a point of departure, the paper articulates an alternative theory of religion, one based on the epistemic rationality grounded in religious experience and religious emotion .     

新媒介环境下传媒与青少年社会化研究

本文对近十几年来国内有关传媒与青少年社会化问题的文献进行了系统回顾,归纳出研究现状和特点:网络和电视等电子媒介是研究的主要内容;研究集中于社会化的结果,缺乏对于青少年的认知机制如何影响其处理传媒的信息的过程研究;研究对象存在着明显的不平衡现象,且概念使用混乱;研究方法日趋多样,但缺乏大型、系统的实证研究。在此基础上,对今后研究的发展方向进行了预测和分析。     

Anti-War Activism: New Media and Protest in the Information Age

This starts out by distinguishing between communication and communication mediums when examining social movement-powered formations of collective identity and collective action. We then focus on communication mediums to examine the different ways that old and new media are utilized in urban social movements under neoliberal capitalism. Based on shifts in the political economy and correspondingly in the contemporary composition of the working class, we focus on the Media Mobilizing Project in Philadelphia to argue that contemporary urban social movements and networks utilize a multi-media platform to further class-based politics. The respective use of old or new media depends on important contextual questions, regarding technology access and geographic aspects of movement building work.     

The New Theology and the Sociology of Religion*

La nouvelle theologie represente une forme contemporaine d'expression religieuse qui est d'un interet tout particulier pour la sociologie des religions. Non seulement pouvons-nous decouvrir quelques-uns des facteurs sociaux qui ont suscité ces changements dans la theologie, mais aussi certaines des consequences sociologiques de la nouvelle theologie suggerent une revision theorique de la perspective traditionnelle (centree sur l'Eglise) de la sociologie des religions. Nous pretendons que cette nouvelle theologie peut fournir des donnees objectives dans noire recherche d'une comprehension sociologique plus exhaustive et universelle de la religion. The New Theology represents a contemporary form of religious expression that is of specific interest to the sociology of religion. Not only can we uncover some of the social sources of this change in theology, but there are also sociological implications of the new theology that encourage a theoretical review of the previously restricted church-oriented perspective of the sociology of religion. It is our contention that the new theology can provide objective data in the quest for a more comprehensive and universal sociological understanding of religion.     

Media Uses in Disaster Situations: A New Focus on the Impact Phase

The media, in the sociology of natural disasters, are mainly viewed as management tools used to influence people's preparedness and response to natural disasters. As a consequence, research in this area has been limited to the warning, preparedness, and recovery phases. Through interviews with residents of eight communities in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico, impacted by Hurricane Georges in 1998, this paper shows that through integrating mass communication research to disaster theory we can obtain a more accurate picture of the media–audience relationship during natural disasters. In addition to the manifest functions of providing information, the media also have latent functions in disasters, which consist of emotional support and companionship. The media also help isolated individuals to feel connected with the "outside world." These functions are most salient in the impact phase of disasters. These functions are also particularly crucial as they have been shown to reduce the negative effects of stressful life events.