Page 15 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

xiv Preface

and abetting them all at once. Media are not simply information delivery
or the representation or misrepresentation of reality, that is, the tools for
consumers and believers to acquire or believe what they want. Media of
all kinds—newspapers and the evening news but also toys, advertisements,
food, clothing, photographs, houses, and music—are constitutive ingredients
in the social construction of reality. People build their worlds, and their
worlds build them. It is this dialectical world-and-self-construction that the
Culturalist paradigm, described by the key words assembled here, means
by the term mediation. To get at this elusive, even magical power of human
activity, scholars of media need to wrestle with culture. But that is not all.
One of the principal and most widely influential cultural activities of human
beings may be designated by the term religion. Belief, understood in the
broadest manner—as a domain of practice no less than creed—is a powerful
glue holding together the worlds in which people live, which they build and
maintain in order that it may bolster and nurture them. How that happens,
how religion is mediation, constitutes the guiding question of the study of
religion, media, and culture.
Not everyone is likely to be content with this formulation because it marks
the place where one discipline trails off into another, where communication
studies becomes anthropology or religious studies or the investigation of
visual culture. But the liminal character of the interdisciplinary study of
religion, media, and culture at work in the essays of this book is not intended
as normative. It is aimed instead at defining an intersection of inquiry that
has something vital to offer a more robust understanding of religion and
media, from whatever direction scholars conduct their work.

*****

One striking difference between this book and Williams’s Keywords is
that what he was able to do by himself, this book undertakes only as a
collaborative effort among fifteen accomplished scholars. It was a communal
effort and one that I intend will document by its very nature the community
of interpretation that has given rise to the turn in thinking that occasions
the book. In addition to the authors represented here by their fine work, I
acknowledge the larger dimensions of debt and gratitude on which the book
rests. The International Study Commission on Media, Religion, and Culture
(1996–2005), founded by the intellectual partnership of Adán Medrano
and Stewart Hoover, did much to advance the intellectual agenda of the
humanistic study of religion and media, which this book seeks to register.
As a member of the group, I learned more than I can reckon traveling and
collaborating with them. Several of its members are among the authors
here.