Page 13 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

xii Preface

because it is what draws scholars together into an extended community of
interpretation and because it helps thematize what it is that draws them
together. Key words communalize knowledge making and direct inquiry by
freeing up thought from older discursive formations in order to pursue new
lines of investigation that respond to new social conditions. That is not all
key words do. They also inform the most basic structures of study absorbed
by students and they serve as the medium in which writers and teachers may
strive for a degree of reflexivity that will endow their work with critical
engagement in the entire history of thought and practice that constitutes the
knowledge of their particular field.
A look at the cover of this book will signal yet another aspect of key words
as tools. When made the object of critical and historically minded reflection,
a field’s defining nomenclature draws it beyond the rarefied precinct of words
uttered in academic halls into the much livelier spaces of the worlds of things
that scholarship endeavors to study. One place that words go is the past, largely
because a word is the intersection of present need and inherited use. Words
may be described as the collision between what people have thought and done
long ago and what they are struggling to accomplish or enjoy in the present.
This means that words are much more than the technical instruments of
scholarly discourse. They are densely storied, heavily freighted semantic habits
that make the universe as familiar, small and short-lived as we are. Words are
social events, institutional devices, among the most powerful media of social
life. Words are also inextricably entangled with things, bodies, feelings, and
public practices and rituals. The key words assembled and explicated here are
no exception. More than merely ideas, and never Platonic essences located in
the mind of a philosopher’s god, words emerge from and return to the dense
avenues of human sociality, the dark histories of power, the shattered places
of lost hopes. One of the most important developments in the recent study
of religion has been the compelling assumption that religion is productively
understood as a robustly embodied, diversely mediated set of practices.
Moreover, these practices are never stable and they are always contested.
The study of the key words gathered here should be measured against these
fundamental insights, which have been vigorously pressed over the last two
or three decades by anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and scholars of
material and visual culture.
The list of critical terms selected and explicated in this book will signal
many things to readers. It will certainly indicate that the study of media
and religion is broadly interdisciplinary. Before the 1980s, the field, if it
even was one, was largely the domain of historians of Christianity, Christian
communicators, and seminary professors, geared toward the improvement
of church communication policy and practice, education, evangelism, and
preaching. Matters have changed since then. Though religious organizations