Page 163 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

146 Pamela E. Klassen

of theorists of communication, Peters’ book demonstrates the profound
significance of religious traditions and spiritual inquiries for the very concepts
of communication and mediation themselves.

Conclusion

Practice is a concept that can help to ground the study of religion and
media in social interactions, in the interplay of thought and action, and in
economic, political, legal, and historical contexts that foster certain kinds of
mediation and not others. Practice is also a concept that invites reflexivity,
making space for scholars to interrogate their own assumptions about
what counts as “mediated religion” or how attitudes of suspicion toward
manipulation, propaganda, and mass culture may inflect a scholar’s analysis.
Applying this reflexivity to the sketch I have provided above, it becomes
clear to me that I have drawn my examples largely from Christian or what
might be called “post-Christian” (e.g., spiritualist) contexts. Though this is
partly because these areas are what I know best as a scholar of religion, John
Durham Peters’ book leads me to speculate that there might be more going
on. In Peters’ book and in the work of most of the theorists and scholars I
discuss here, Christianity is the primary religion used to think with: whether
formulating a theory of practice via a critique of Feuerbach’s The Essence
of Christianity (Marx 1970); comparing the calendrical and narrative
dominance of the Church and that of radio and newspapers (de Certeau
1984); or drawing parallels between the propaganda of the Church and that
of the magazine industry (Lefebvre 2002; see also Hall 1997; Morgan and
Promey 2001). Peters thinks with Christianity in a very explicit manner,
in that he traces a genealogy of communication focused on questions of
spirit and body as found in critical theorists such as Adorno and Benjamin,
and Christian thinkers such as Augustine, Kierkegaard, and Ernest Hocking.
Whether implicit or explicit, however, the practice of thinking about religion
and media primarily through the category and history of Christianity is
necessarily limiting (cf. Hoover and Clark 2002; Meyer and Moors 2006;
Hirschkind 2006; Whitehouse 2000). The virtues of practice, then, are that
it both opens an approach to the study of religion and media that can account
for “everyday life” and larger structures of social organization and calls for
a persistent reassessment of what counts as sources for religion, media, and
the everyday within the practices of scholars.

Notes
1 Writing in German, Marx used praxis, but English translations of his work
alternate between “praxis” and “practice.” Praxis seems more fully inflected by