Page 86 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

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Culture

Angela Zito

Religion and media
Culture (and religion) as meaning
Culture (and religion, and media) as practice
Culture as mediation
Some examples

“…The project of the Enlightenment philosophes was radical revision
of the nature of culture that would displace religion from its dominant
position…The institutions and media of civil society: philosophy, literature,
the arts, sciences, journalism and popular culture also gained at religion’s
expense and became the prime venues in which ethical and aesthetic issues
are seriously engaged…the chief battlegrounds in the cultural conflicts of
modernity.”
Bruce Lincoln, “Culture”

“Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English
language… partly because of its intricate historical development, in several
European languages, but mainly because it has now come to be used for
important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines, and in several
distinct and incompatible systems of thought.”
Raymond Williams, Keywords

“The concept of culture is such a weak and evanescent notion in American
social thought….This intellectual aversion to the idea of culture derives in
part from our obsessive individualism, which makes psychological life the
paramount reality; from our Puritanism, which leads to disdain for the
significance of human activity that is not practical and work oriented; and
from our isolation of science from culture: science provides culture-free
truth whereas culture provides ethnocentric error.”
James W. Carey, “Communication as Culture”