Literature for the Study of Media, Religion and Culture
Journals:
Journal of Media and Religion. Edited by respected U.S. scholars in religion and media Daniel Stourt and Judith Buddenbaum, this journal, which premiered in 2002, promises to be a landmark in the study of media, religion, and culture, examinig a full range of religious traditions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Eastern religious philosophies, and new/alternative spiritual movements, While its emphasis is primarily social scientific, the journal publishes articles from humanistic traditions, as well.
Journal of Religion and Film. This site offers full articles as well as film reviews, many of which are written by North American scholars in the fields of religious studies, theology, and film studies. Articles feature textual, psychological, and ideological analyses of films that range from the popular to the obscure.
Journal of Religion and Popular Culture. The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture is a web-based, peer-reviewed journal committed to the academic exploration, analysis and interpretation, from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, of the interrelations and interactions between religion and religious expression and popular culture, broadly defined as the products of contemporary mass culture. Funded by a grant from the University of Saskatchewan Publications Fund.
Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture. The journal was developed to address the question: What are the relationships among human beings and what is understood by the terms religion, nature and culture. This question raises a host of others, which are difficult and complex, because they are intertwined with and complicated by a host of cultural, environmental and religious variables. The fundamental goal of this journal is to explore these variables.
Books and Articles:
The following is not an exhaustive list of pertinent literature in the field of media, religion and culture, but does represent key works that we have found helpful.
- Religion and Spirituality
- Media and Communication
- Media, Religion and Culture
- Social Theory/Culture
- Key Methods Literature
Religion and Spirituality
Albanese, C. (1993). Fisher kings and public places: The old new age in the 1990s. Annals, AAPSS, 527, 131-143.
Albanese, C. (1990). Nature religion in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Braun, W. and McCutcheon, R. T. (). Guide to the study of religion. New York: Cassell.
Geertz, C. (1966). Religion as a cultural system. In M. Banton (Ed.). Anthropological approaches to the study of religion (pp. 1-45). London: Tavistock Publications.
Hall, D. D. (1997). Lived religion in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Heelas, P. (2003 May). The authority of the spiritual self. Paper presented at the conference Alternative Spiritualities and New Age Studies, Open University, Milton Keynes, UK.
Heelas, P. (1993). The new age in cultural context: The premodern, the modern and the postmodern. Religion, 23, 103-116.
James, W. (1997). Varieties of religious experience. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
King, U. (2001). Spirituality and society in the new millennium. Brighton: Sussex Press.
Gordon, L. (2007). The New Spirituality: Progressive Faith in the Twenty-First Century. London: IB Tauris.
Gordon, L. (2005). Understanding Theology and Popular Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.
Gordon, L. (2003). Losing My Religion? Moving on From Evangelical Faith. London: DLT.
Gordon, L. (2002). After Religion: "Generation X" and the Search for Meaning. London: DLT.
Morgan, D. (2005). Sacred Gaze. University of California Press.
Pike, S. (2004). New Age and Neopagan Religions in America. Columbia University Press.
Roof, W.C. (1999). Spiritual marketplace. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sutcliffe, S. & Bowman, M. (2000). Beyond new age: Exploring alternative spirituality. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Taylor, M. C. (1998). Critical terms for religious studies . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Woodhead, L., Heelas, P., & Davie, G. (2003). Predicting religion: Christian, secular and alternative futures. Hampshire, England: Ashgate Publishing.
Wuthnow, R. (1998). After Heaven: Spirituality in America since 1950. University of California Press.
Media and Communication
Carey, J. (1989). A cultural approach to communication. New York: Routledge.
de Vries, H. (2001). In media res: global religion, public spheres, and the task of contemporary comparative religious studies. In H. de Vries and S. Webber (Eds.). Religion and media (pp. 3-42). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Dayan, D. & Katz, E. (1992). Media events: The live broadcasting of history. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Kellner, D. (1995). Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern. London, New York: Routledge.
Thompson, J.B. (1995). Media and modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Van Zoonen, L. (1994). Feminist Media Studies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Media, Religion and Culture
Campbell, H. (2005). Exploring Religious Community Online. Peter Lang-Digital Formation Series (2005)
Clark, L. S. (2007). Religion, Media and Marketplace. Rutgers University Press.
Couldry, N. (2006). Listening Beyond the Echoes: Media, Ethics and Agency in an Uncertain World. Paradigm books.
Couldry, N. (2003).Media Rituals: A Critical Approach. Routledge
Couldry, N. and Curran, J. (2003). Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World . Rowman and Littlefield.
Couldry, N. (2000).The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media AgeRoutledge.
Couldry, N. (2000).Inside Culture Sage.
Dayan, D. and Katz, E. (reprint 2006). Media Events. Harvard University Press.
Forbes, B. D. & Mahan, J.H. (2000). Religion and Popular Culture in America, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
Hendershot, H. (2004). Shaking the world for Jesus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hess, M. (2005). Engaging Technology in Theological Education: All That We Canft Leave Behind. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.
Hoover, S. and Lundby, K. (1997). Rethinking media, religion and culture. Newbury Park: Sage.
Hoover, S. & Clark, L.S. (2002). Practicing religion in the age of the media: Explorations in media, religion, and culture (pp. 35-36, 87-89, 163-164, 201-202, 235-236, 291-293). New York: Columbia University Press.
Hoover, S. (2001). Visual religion in media culture. In D. Morgan and S. Promey (Eds.). The visual culture of American religions (pp.146-159). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hoover, S.M. (2006). Religion in the age of media. London, New York: Routledge.
Hoover, S. M. (1997). Media and the construction of the religious public sphere. In S. Hoover and K. Lundby (Eds.). Rethinking media, religion, and culture, (pp. 283-297). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Hoover, S. & Venturelli, S. (1996). The category of the religious: The blindspot of contemporary media theory? Critical Studies in Mass Communication 13, 251-265.
Horsfield, P. (2005). Emerging research in media, religion and culture. (Editor). Melbourne: RMIT Publishing.
Horsfield, P. (1986). Taming the television: a parentfs guide to children and television. Sydney: Albatross Books.
Horsfield, P., Hess, M. and Medrano, A. (2004). Belief in media: Cultural perspectives on media and Christianity. London: Ashgate Press.
Mahan, J.H. (2005). Revised edition, Religion and Popular Culture in America, The University of California Press.
Mitchell, J. (2007). Media and Christian Ethics. Cambridge University Press.
Morgan, D. (1996). Icons of American Protestantism. New Haven: Yale.
Morgan, D. (1996). The Lure of Images: A History of Religion and Visual Media in the United States. London: Routledge.
Morgan, D. (2005). The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Morgan, D. (1999). Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production. New York: Oxford University Press.
Morgan, D. (1998). Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Morgan, D. and Promey, S. (2001).The Visual Culture of American Religions .Berkeley: University of California Press.
Peck, J. (1995). TV talk shows as therapeutic discourse: The ideological labor of the televised talking cure. Communications Theory, 5 (1), 58-81.
Stout, D. and Buddenbaum, J. (1996). Religion and Mass Media. Sage.
Social Theory/Culture
Barthes, R. (1972). Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang.
Denzin, N. (1992). Symbolic interactionism and cultural studies. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Garnham, N. & Williams, R. (1986). Pierre Bourdieu and the sociology of culture: An introduction. In R. Collins et al (Eds.). Media, Culture and Society: A Critical Reader (pp. 116-130). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late-modern age. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks. New York: International Publishers.
Grossberg, L., Nelson, C. and P. Treichler (1992). Cultural studies. London and New York: Routledge.
Hall. S. (1996). The problem of ideology: Marxism without guarantees. D. Morley and K-H. Chen (Eds.). Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues (pp. 25-46). London and New York: Routledge.
Weber, M. (1958). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. New York: Scribner's Press.
Key Methods Literature
Abu-Lughod, L. (1991). Writing against culture. In R. Fox (Ed.). Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the present (pp. 137-162). Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press.
Clark, L.S. (2004 May). The turn to popular communication in the humanities,sociology, and anthropology: Emergent directions for audience studies. Paper presented at the International Communication Association, New Orleans.
Clark, L.S. (2002). The Protestantization of research into media, religion and culture. In S. Hoover and L.S. Clark (Eds.). Practicing religion in the age of media (pp. 7-33). New York: Columbia University Press.
Clifford, J. & Marcus, G. E. (1986). Writing culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y. S. (1998) The landscape of qualitative research: Theories and issues. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
Fine, M. (1998). Working the hyphens. In N.K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.) The landscape of qualitative research: Theories and issues (pp. 130-153). Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
Foley, D. E. (2002). Critical ethnography: The reflexive turn. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 15, (4), 469-490.
Gibson, T. A. (2000). Beyond cultural populism: Notes toward the critical ethnography of media audiences. Journal of Communication Inquiry 24 (3), 253-273.
Guba, E. & Lincoln, Y. (1998). Competing paradigms in qualitative research. In N.K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.). The landscape of qualitative research: Theories and issues (pp. 195-219). Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
Hagen, I. & Wasco, J. (2000). Consuming audiences: Production and reception in media research . New Jersey: Hampton Press.
Lindlof, T. R. (1995). Qualitative communication research methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Lindlof, T.R. (1991). The qualitative study of media audiences. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 35 (1), 23-42.
Lindlof, T.R., and Taylor, B. (2002). Qualitative Communication Research Methods, (2nd Edition). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
McWilliams, E. (1997).Performing between the posts: Authority, posture, and contemporary feminist scholarship. In W.G. Tierney and Y.S. Lincoln (Eds.). Representation and the text (pp. 219-232). Albany: State University of New York Press.
Morley, D. & Silverstone, R. (1991). Communication and context: Ethnographic perspectives on the media audience. In K.B. Jensen & N. Jankowski (Eds.) A handbook of qualitative methodologies for mass communication research (pp. 149-162). London: Routledge.
Rabinow, P. (1986). Representations are social facts: Modernity and post-modernity in anthropology. In. J. Clifford & G.E. Marcus (Eds.). Writing Culture (pp. 234-261). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Seiter, E. (1999). Television and new media audiences. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Supriya, K.E. (2001). Evocation of and enactment in Apna Ghar: Performing ethnographic self-reflexivity. Text and Performance Quarterly, 21 (4), 225-246.