- The
International Study Commission on
Media, Religion & Culture
Core Issues
- 1.
In what ways can we say that the media have come
to occupy the spaces traditionally occupied by
religion?
- What religious
functions do media fulfill?
- What are the
new forms
of spirituality that are emerging?
- Where/how is
transcendence found or experienced?
- What are the
means of meaning-making?
2. What is
the relationship of religious authority to modes of
symbolic practice?
- Is there a
necessary or historic relationship between
authority and certain modes of symbolic practice,
such as the linear modes?
- Are the visual
modes inherently threatening to authority? If so,
what kinds of authority? Where? Whose?
- What are the
prospects of religious authority and its
practices of legitimation as a consequence of
these conditions?
3. How must
we re-think the relationship between religion and the
media?
- How does the
new situation call into question former
dichotomies of sacred and profane spheres, "good" vs "bad" media,
etc?
- How does the
new situation call into question the traditional "instrumental" understanding of media
which has been supported: many media production
activities of the churches; media reform activism
of various kinds; and the so-called "media
literacy" movement?
4. What
does this new situation imply about epistemology?
- Does it call
for new epistemologies in order to account for
it?
- Is the new
situation indicative of changed epistemologies in
general? That is, that the whole way we think
about reality has now been altered.
- What is the
relation of media practice to epistemology (i.e.,
are the postmodernists right in claiming that the
changed epistemology of the postmodern is a
consequence of the media)?
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