Page 73 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

4

Community

J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu

Community, media, and religious experience
Religious quest: Individual and communal
Religious pluralism, media, and community
New media and community
African religion, migration, and community
Media ministry, actual institution (ministry), and community
Community media

Contrary to earlier predictions of the “death of God” by the turn of the twenty-
first century, religion is flourishing. Increased religious fundamentalism and
proliferation of new religions and religious media means our world remains
enchanted. Through the media, religion has gained increased visibility and
space in public discourse in spite of attempts in the West to keep it as a
private endeavor. Its core ingredients, concerns, and defining characteristics
include belief, worship, faith, sacrifice, transcendence, doctrine, offering,
mediation, pilgrimage, prayer, community, creeds, icons and images,
symbols and other relational elements, and devotions to sacred objects and
practices. “Transcendent reality” and “community” remain the two axes
around which the others revolve. Along one axis religion presupposes the
existence of a transcendent unseen realm, the source of life, power, comfort,
sustenance, and strength. Along the other axis is the earthly realm of human
beings commonly associated with weakness, limitation, powerlessness,
helplessness, the search for meaning and, ultimately, with death. The two
axes intersect in revelations and human responses as people search for
salvation in a precarious world. Religious groups constitute community in
its quintessential form because shared aspirations for deliverance from the
human predicament throw people together. Indeed, in traditional cultures
such as those of Africa and Australasia, the sacred and secular realms of
existence remain inseparable, and the key word is “participation.” Religious
community here potentially includes the living and the transcendent ancestor
who may be physically dead but remains an active participant in the religious
life of the community.