Media, Religion & Culture, Louisville, Kentucky

Dennis Smith, Rolando Pérez, Renee de la Torre and Pradip Thomas in Kentucky

Religion, it seems, has become a focus for research and study not only as a result of 9/11 but because of the ferment within mainstream religions brought on by globalisation, new expectations of religion, the moral decline of mainstream religions, new religions and opportunities for exploring the meanings of transcendence and of course the impact of new technologies on religious experience and the search for meaning.

The loss of foundational myths featured in a conversation that I had with a brilliant anthropologist from Brazil, Maria de Lourdes Beldi de Alcantara. She works among the Guarani Indians who have lost their foundational myths. As a result, they do not have the resources to deal with the new myths of life and salvation expounded by the more than thirty different neo-pentecostal sects currently preying on these hapless communities. The result: suicide on a massive scale.

Joon Lee’s paper on the ‘Construction of Spirituality in a Virtual Cemetery’, Francis Plude’s study of the use of the Internet as a forum for the discussion of church sexual scandals (there were quite a few papers on the media and sex scandals in the Catholic church), and Jason Shim’s experiential study of virtual reality ethics of an adult software game called ‘Second Life’, among other papers on on-line religion, is a reflection of the many ways in which online experiences are beginning to transform the ways in which religion is experienced. Shim’s study was both humourous (Shim 2 as a participant in Second Life did not follow the rules of the game, lost his clothes in the process, was rapped by his fellow virtual companions for indecency, and ended up with a motorbike stuck to his head at which point he quit!) and serious (there are many who would like the virtual world to be a copy of the real-world, a manageable environment with rules, restrictions, boundaries, peopled by the included and the excluded). Heidi Campbell’s (University of Edinburgh) panel that dealt with ethics in the context of digital media connected squarely with some of the issues of concern to WACC, in particular to the science, faith and IT debate.

The off-line world of religion that most people continue to connect with did (thankfully) feature in many of the presentations. From papers on the visuality of icons, media ethics and religious news, mass mediated religion, the media and the commodification of worship, faith-based documentary film making, popular religion, humour and the media, religious film including a paper by another WACC friend Thomas Cooper on Gibson’s Passion of Christ, teaching religion and communication and a good overview of communication and theology by the Jesuit scholar Paul Soukup.

A WACC-sponsored cocktail evening provided an opportunity for the WACC team to communicate WACC’s on-going work on media, religion and cultures through the Global Studies Programme and regional work.