Religion and Media 2006 Abstracts
Religion and Media Interest Group
Catholicism and Public Opinion: A Study of the Church as a Source of Political Information • J. Connor Best, Louisiana State University • This paper explores the role of the Church as a disseminator of political information through priests and media. Using data gathered from Catholics about where they gather political information this study determined whether the Church is an important influence on political behavior. This study finds that no particular source of information source within the Church dominates. Rather, Catholics use multiple information sources to synthesize their own understanding of what the Church teaches on political issues.
Consecrating the Bully Pulpit: A Presumed Media Influence Model of Evangelical Christians’ Attitudes Toward President George W. Bush • Ken Blake and Robert O. Wyatt, Middle Tennessee State University • Based on telephone polls in 2005 and 2006 of random adults in a Southern state with a high concentration of evangelical Christians, this study applied logistic regression and the presumed media influence model to explain evangelicals’ approval of President George W. Bush. Findings robustly linked evangelicals’ approval of Bush to their presumption that he would both enact religiously conservative policies and influence people to take religious faith more seriously. The model behaved rationally over time.
Building the Pure Land on Earth: Ciji’s media cultural discourse • Chiung Hwang Chen, Brigham Young University • With its resourceful media practice and insistence on a neo-Buddhist this-worldly theology, the Buddhist Compassion Relief Foundation (Tzu Chi or Ciji) has constructed a unique cultural discourse, one that competes against the mainstream media culture in Taiwan. This paper employs a cultural studies approach to analyze Ciji’s media cultural discourse.
The Missing Link: A Content Study of Religion as a Navigational Element on the Home Pages of U.S. Daily Newspapers • Mary Carmen Cupito, Northern Kentucky University • A content study of every U.S. daily general circulation newspaper with a website indicated that 14 percent or 187 of the 1,355 newspaper home pages had direct links or sublinks to news about faith or spirituality. Among these newspapers, few included multimedia or interactive dimensions. A regional analysis showed that more southern papers had home page links or sublinks to religion content than elsewhere in the country.
The 3R’s of El Salvador’s Civil War Revolution, Religion, and Radio • Juanita Darling, California State University • In the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country of El Salvador, Church leaders were often quoted and one priest regularly spoke on rebel radio, supporting the insurgency. This collaboration lasted throughout a twelve-year struggle that ended in 1992. This paper examines that collaboration based on oral history interviews, memoirs, and analysis of tapes of the broadcasts. It also posits that the alliance contributed to expanding the public sphere and laying a foundation for democratic decision-making.
The Second Text: Missionary Publishing and Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress • David N. Dixon, Malone College • With surprising regularity, missionaries in the l9th and early 20th centuries choose The Pilgrim’s Progress as one of the first texts to translate. This paper seeks to explore why a then 200-year-old allegory was held in such high esteem by the missionaries that they considered it second only to the Bible as a necessary work. It suggests that the book embodied a complex, sometimes paradoxical missionary ideology that still affects Africa today.
Jihad and Crusade in International Media Discourse • Mark Hungerford, University of Washington • A content analysis was conducted on newspapers in four countries to determine how media discourse interpreted and framed the terms jihad and crusade. While newspapers across the different countries interpreted jihad in similar ways (violent, committed by Muslims, without historical context), there was greater diversity between English-language and non-English language newspapers on usage of the term crusade. Overall, each newspapers used these terms to depict a violent other waging violence upon the national self.
Priests And Public Opinion: Assessing The Effects Of Framing The Catholic Church’s Sexual Abuse Scandal • Ally Ostrowski, University of Colorado • Since the early 90s, news media have brought stories of sexual transgressions by Catholic clergy into the public eye. This study examined the framing of the Catholic priest sexual abuse scandals to ascertain how audiences were potentially affected by the presentations they are shown.
The Effects of Religious Outdoor Advertising: An Experimental Study • Jefferson Spurlock, Troy University • This study examines the effectiveness of outdoor religious messages. In other words, does exposure to roadside advertisements displaying religious messages, particular church services or prayer, increase one’s intent to attend church services or to engage in active prayer? Three hundred thirty-five undergraduate and graduate students from a large southern university took part in the study’s experiment (Seventeen students did not complete the experiment so their responses were eliminated).
Media and Religion: The Promise of Cultural Biography • Daniel A. Stout, University of South Carolina • This paper argues that cultural biography is an important method for the developing subfield of media and religion. Based on examinations of biographies of mass communication theorists, it is concluded that religious thought often plays a strong role in secular theoretical development about media. The cultural biographies studied also revealed rigor and effectiveness as an exploratory method.
Jesus Christ, Movie Star: Exploring the Power Embedded in Evangelical Responses to The Last Temptation of Christ and The Passion of the Christ • James Y. Trammell, St. John Fisher College • This paper compares the evangelical Christian use and interpretation of The Last Temptation of Christ and The Passion of the Christ in order to explore how evangelicals use mainstream movies as a means to secure social power. Through Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social power embedded in the use and interpretation of media texts, this paper interprets how evangelicals create dominant meanings of the movies, and use film releases as a call to defend evangelicalism.
Coverage of Faith-based Activism: The ADL, MPAC, and CAIR in the News • James Christian Zvonec • California State University-Northridge • This study examined newspaper coverage of faith-based activism, looking at how the ADL, MPAC, and CAIR were portrayed over a five-year time period. The newspapers constructed three main identities for the Jewish group (watchdog, defender of Jews, and expert source) and the two Islamic groups (watchdog, terrorism apologist, and voice of American Muslims), leading to the conclusion that the newspapers were working from a secularized Judeo-Christian ideology.
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