2007/1

Tink Tinker

Every year one to two thousand people line the streets in Denver, USA, to protest the annual columbusday parade, to oppose what is a blatant celebration of five hundred years of genocide in the Americas. A federal holiday only since 1971, columbusday seems to have become a quintessential U.S. holiday, yet one that commemorates a murderer, slave-trader and thief as the all-American hero.

Pradip N. Thomas

The turn towards Hindu nationalism in India has been a subject of academic study for over two decades. Events such as the pogroms (February-April 2002), against Muslims in Gujarat immediately after the Godhra killings in February 2002, the murder of the Australian-born evangelist Graham Staines (January 1999) and the destruction of the Babri Masjid (December 1992) received international and national media coverage.

Dennis Smith

In 2006 the Latin America region of the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC-AL) held a series of meetings on 'Communication, Politics and Religious Fundamentalisms'. The conferences were held in collaboration with the Catholic University 'San Pablo' of La Paz, Bolivia, the Methodist University of São Paulo, Brazil, the Central American Evangelical Center for Pastoral Studies in Guatemala City, Guatemala and the Methodist Seminary in Santiago, Chile.

Steve Rabey

In 2004, religion scholar Stephen Prothero wrote a review in The New York Times Book Review of James Ault’s book Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church. In the review Prothero claimed that when it comes to American religion, 'the last acceptable prejudice is anti-fundamentalism'. That assertion may be debatable, but I think many would agree with Prothero’s lament that, 'Fundamentalism has been scoffed at more than it has been studied.'

Ogbu Kalu

Media use in contemporary Africa has attracted much attention because the charismatic and Pentecostal movement has been the most avid consumers. Indeed, it is argued that media use is the most important explanation for the growth because it valorized the missionary strategy that so radically reshaped the religious landscape that it has charismatized the mainline churches. Cephas Omenyo’s study, Pentecost Outside Pentecostalism documents the trend in Ghana.1 A recent documentary by James Ault on African Christianity, shot in Ghana and Zimbabwe, illustrates how the liturgy, doctrine, ethics and other practices in the mainline churches resonate with Pentecostal spirituality, liturgy and doctrines. Two explanations argue that the missionary-founded churches are engaged in encapsulating strategy; that they retain their members by enlarging the charismatic space for the youth and women. The second explanation is that Africans have always been attracted to the charismatic and pneumatic elements of the gospel because these resonate with the goals and practices of traditional religion. This buttresses the argument that African Christianity is an extension of African traditional religion. People come to the charismatic churches to seek answers to questions raised within the interiors of the primal worldviews. The implication is that Pentecostalism is growing because of its cultural policy and attitude to indigenous worldview and culture. Therefore, the goal here is to reflect on the Pentecostal cultural discourse rather than to explore how they use media. The cultural policy is the backdrop or foil to their media use.

Stewart M. Hoover and Nadia Kaneva

The religion we see in the media today seems increasingly polarized and embroiled in emerging fronts of conflict and struggle. The media are also quick to tell us that the religious impulse most responsible for this polarization is the impulse to 'fundamentalism'. The origins of this term can be traced to U.S. Protestantism at the turn of the 20th century, but the fundamentalist idea has shown a protean tendency to expression in a variety of religious and cultural locations.

Sheila J. Gibbons

The rising influence of fundamentalist religious and political leaders around the world is a staple of discussion in mainstream media and the alternative press, in online chats on web sites operated by NGO activists and bloggers, and in media controlled by fundamentalists themselves. Among all these entities there are wide disparities in how often and how candidly they explain how fundamentalism is affecting the lives of women and girls.

William F. Fore

A brief summary of the history of televangelism in the United States, how it began, grew, and finally dominated the media is given in the following article. It explores some implications of this history, and indicates why the subject deserves a good deal more careful analysis than it has received thus far. Along the way it describes some events that are virtually unknown about how the televangelists gained power over the Federal Communication Commission _ a power that has provided a unique opportunity for fundamentalist religion to effect cultural change during the past forty years.

Nabil Echchaibi

In February 2006, when Wafa Sultan, a Syrian-American activist in Southern California who advocates secularism in Muslim countries, defiantly told an Islamic sheikh on a widely popular Al-Jazeera news show 'to shut up and listen, it’s my turn', she knew she was making history on Arab television. Never before has the authority of Islam represented on this show by a conservative sheikh from Cairo’s famed Al-Azhar University been challenged in a similarly brazen way by another Muslim, and much less so by a woman.

On 13 December 2006, after five years of negotiations, an international treaty giving greater rights and freedoms to disabled people around the world was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly. The UN Convention on the Rights and Dignity of Persons with Disabilities is the first human rights treaty of the 21st Century. The UN expects that it will contribute to a significant im-provement in the lives of disabled people whose world population is estimated to be 650 million.