Religion and Media 2012 Abstracts
Faculty
Turning the Tide: The Religious Press’ Role in the Passage of the Civil Rights Act • Mike Trice, Florida Southern College • In recent years, much has been said about the religious right’s efforts to play a significant role in policy making in the United States. Such participation by religious groups is not new. This paper examines one of the most aggressive efforts by the church to influence government – the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – and how the religious press played a significant role in those efforts.
Islam, Mediation and Technology • Nabil Echchaibi, University of Colorado Boulder • This paper analyzes how historical reactions to print and writing still inform contemporary Muslim approaches to religious communication. I look at how Muslim jurists and scholars have rationalized their rejection of printing during the Ottoman empire in the 18th and 19th centuries and compare their reaction to how contemporary scholars and popular preachers rationalize their adoption of modern communication technologies both during the modernist period of late 19th and early 20th century and today.
Engaging the Congregation: A Mediated Model of Religious Leaders’ Cues, Environmental Concern, and Environmental Behaviors • Jay Hmielowski, Yale University • Scientists continue to raise concerns about threats from environmental problems such as climate change. Concern amongst scientists have increased efforts to create programs that raise public awareness of these issues and citizens to engage in behaviors that reduce the negative impact humans are having on the environment. These efforts include the use of mass media messages to raise awareness about environment problems and suggest ways to change behaviors.
Muslim media in the United States and their role in the American Public Square • Mohammad Siddiqi, Western Illinois University • This study focuses on emerging Muslim media in the U. S. and their role in helping Muslims understand and participate in the American public square. A content analysis method is used to analyze the contents of a sample of the leading Muslim magazines and newspapers. The study focuses on the general themes and contents of Muslim media and the shift in themes, contents and priorities over a period of the past ten years.
The Megachurch Tweets: How 13 Large Churches are Using Twitter • Sheree Martin, Samford University; Elizabeth Akin; Anna Cox; Ashlee Franks; Rachel Freeny, Samford University; Kadie Haase, Samford University; Ben Johnson, Samford University; Anna King, Samford University; Michael Kline, Samford University; Jackie Long, Samford University; Steven Lyles, Samford University; Megan Thompson, Samford University • This study is a content analysis of all tweets from the primary Twitter account of 13 of the 15 largest churches in the U.S. during the month of February 2012. Results indicate that Twitter is mainly used to promote church activities using a one-to-many broadcast approach rather than conversational and relational communication techniques associated with social media, relationship marketing and relationship management theory. Each of the churches in the study uses Twitter in a different way.
Seeing and Not Believing: Concern for Visual Culture in The Humanist • Rick Clifton Moore, Boise State University • A recent study of a publication distributed by a powerful conservative Christian group determined the organization showed strong concern for “visual culture.” The magazine directed readers on how to understand the seen world. The current study analyzes a periodical of an avowedly secular group to understand how they might manifest similar or different concerns. On the whole, The Humanist appears to indicate that visual culture is as important to agnostics as it is to theists.
Missing Voices: A study of religious voices in Mainstream Media reports about LGBT rights • Debra Mason, University of Missouri • A three-year sample of news reports about key political issues within the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transexual (LGBT) community showed that when media outlets cited religious leaders, they consistently used sources from Evangelical organizations to speak about LGBT issues, and the messages from those sources were significantly more negative than positive. The media used far fewer religious sources from Mainline Protestant, Catholic or Jewish sources, but those messages were predominantly positive.
The Environmental Movement and American Religion in the Network Society: Reconfiguring Hierarchies to Exist within Heterarchical Organizational Structures • Kathryn Montalbano, Columbia University • This essay is concerned with the characterization and appropriation of the environmental movement by three prominent religious institutions in the United States today―Catholicism, Evangelical Protestantism, and Judaism―and how such religious organizations are affirming human responsibility for global warming (though the Christian campaigns seek to protect the humans over the non-humans).
Student
Christian Communication in 140 Characters or Less • Brittany Pruett • The purpose of this paper is to examine how Christian leaders utilize Twitter. This paper took Rybalko and Seltzer’s (2010) study of dialogic principles in Twitter and applied it to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler, using a sample of his tweets from February 2012. This was done by categorizing the dialogic principles based on the two main functions of Christian mass communication, evangelizing non-Christians and edifying current Christians.
Rational Choice in Religious Advertising: American Religions Adapt to the Spiritual Marketplace • Andrew Pritchard, North Dakota State University; Julie Fudge, North Dakota State University • Content analysis of television advertising by national religions suggests these institutions have accepted a rational-choice view of their place in American religious pluralism. Their ads employ more generic imagery than religious symbols and emphasize religions’ ability meet psychological and social needs more than traditional benefits of religious participation. Presenting a religion as provider of more than explicitly religious benefits is consistent with active competition for practitioners desiring the best cost-benefit ratio from their religious choice.
Holy App! An Exploration of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic iPhone Applications • Wendi Bellar, Syracuse University • The more apps become available for mobile users to download, the more aspects of life that are engaged through mobile technology, including religion and spirituality. The purpose of this study is to explore the phenomenon of Christian, Jewish, Islamic iPhone apps using textual analysis of the app pages on iTunes. The intent is to discover what these apps are communicating about religion and also how the apps attempt to help users navigate their religious and spiritual lives.
How Buddhism Communicate via Sina Weibo • Meng Shi, American University; Xiao He, American University • Social media is becoming increasingly popular among various business organizations and other interest groups. Religious groups also have begun to use social media to promote their truth claims and attract followers. In China, Buddhist leaders are particularly active on Chinese Twitter-equivalent micro-blogs. This article will take Buddhism as an example to introduce the Buddhism communication activities on Sina Weibo, which is the most popular Twitter-equivalent in China.
A Parade Or A Riot: A Discourse Analysis of Two Ethnic Newspapers in Northern Ireland • Dave Ferman, University of Oklahoma • The annual marching season in Northern Ireland has long been the site of ethnic/religious controversy and violence pitting Catholics against Protestants. This study analyzes how more than 80 news stories from two Belfast-based ethnic newspapers, the Catholic/nationalist Irish News and the Protestant/loyalist News Letter, framed the 2011 season.
More Diverse Images of Women Found in Smaller Niche Magazine: Diverse Feminine Images Presented in Christian Teen Magazines • Charlotte Martinez, Ohio University • This research seeks to broaden the knowledge and scholarly literature about teenage, female, Christian magazines and the ideologies they present about femininity. A content analysis of two Christian magazines targeting young girls was undertaken in order to assess whether diverse images of females were present. The study included every image of a female in a composite year for both Brio and Brio&Beyond.
The Muslim Fallacy: An Examination of Public Opinion and the Framing of Barack Obama’s Religion • Joseph Kasko, University of South Carolina • President Barack Obama has consistently stated that he is Christian and numerous media reports have repeated his pronouncement. However, there has long been confusion over the president’s religious beliefs. The confusion seemed to grow when only 34 percent of Americans correctly identified Obama as Christian in an August 18, 2010 Pew Research poll. That was a 14 point decline from a March 2009 Pew poll the previous year and a 17 point drop since October 2008.
Male in the Masjid: Framing men on Little Mosque on the Prairie • Rosemary Pennington, Indiana University School of Journalism • Little Mosque on the Prairie premiered on the CBC in 2007 to an audience of 2.1 million viewers. The sitcom focused on the lives of a small Muslim community living in the fictional rural town of Mercy, Saskatchewan. This textual analysis of the first season examined the framing of Muslim men on Little Mosque and found several different types of Muslim men were featured, all representing a type of Muslim at ease in the West.
The Othering of Terrorists: An Analysis of Two Major U.S. Newspapers’ Use of the Word Terrorist and Subsequent Mention of Religion • Jennifer Hoewe, The Pennsylvania State University • This study analyzes use of the word terrorist in the headlines of the New York Times and Washington Post and the subsequent mentions of specific religions. A six-year content analysis revealed a strong relationship between the word terrorist in these publications’ news story headlines and mentions of Islam within the stories. The argument is made that the word terrorist in the headline of these news story serves as a prime, which is then continually associated with Islam.
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