Page 155 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

138 Pamela E. Klassen

religious borrowing, appropriation, and hybridity (Griffith 1997; Bender
2003; McNally 2000).
In the case of religion and media, the concept of practice has facilitated
a shift from focusing purely on the message of a text, image, or sound to
considering the medium in its many dimensions: how it works and who
controls it, to what range of human senses a particular medium appeals,
what people do with both messages and the media that transmit them,
and how ritual, theologies, and religious dispositions are constituted and
transformed by different kinds of media. Thinking with the help of practice
situates a particular medium (e.g., scrolls, books, icons, television) in at least
four ways: (1) as a pathway for communicative discourse, (2) as a product
that requires both human labor and resources for its creation, (3) as a pliable
form that calls forth a range of embodied and imaginative responses from its
consumers, and (4) as a communicative form that is given religious meaning
in and of itself. Radio, for example, is at once (1) a wave medium that allows
for the transmission of sound across great distance, (2) something that has
been regulated by state legislation and requires training and costly equipment,
and (3) an entity that religious groups have used very effectively to transmit
their messages to listeners who hear and react to these messages while in
their homes, cars, and workplaces (Hangen 2002; Hilmes 1997). At a fourth
level, radio is a medium that some have considered to be a vibrational force
tuned to a spiritual frequency, parallel to the way in which some religions
consider text to be a medium of divine communication. Anglican clergyman
Frederick Du Vernet, for example, argued in the 1920s that “spiritual radio”
transmitted the healing power of God (Klassen 2007; see also Schmidt 2000;
Peters 1999).
Whether via radios, Bibles, sutras, amulets, or video games, religion is
created and mediated through a variety of communicative forms that depend
on physical, technological, and cultural production and the reception and
response of audiences. As Colleen McDannell suggests: “Religious practices
are ‘multimedia events,’ where speech, vision, gesture, touch, and sound
combine” (McDannell 2001: 4). The concept of practice helps scholars of
religion and media to pay attention to how people think and how they act
in a range of sensory modes and to the material conditions, structures of
authority, and relations of power that make such action possible.

A brief genealogy of the concept of practice

The concept of practice became especially important to scholars of religion
in the 1980s and 1990s as the field became increasingly interested in the role
of religion in people’s everyday lives, including those people not represented
in traditional scholarship based as it was on textual sources mostly authored