Religion and media

de Hent de Vries, Weber, Samuel

Counter The twenty-five contributors to this volume - who include such influential thinkers as Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Talal Asad, and James Siegel - confront the conceptual, analytical, and empirical difficulties involved in addressing the complex relationship between religion and media. The book's introductory section offers a prolegomenon to the multiple problems raised by an interdisciplinary approach to these multifaceted phenomena. The essays in the following part provide exemplary approaches to the historical and systematic background to the study of religion and media. The third part presents case studies by anthropologists and scholars of comparative religion. The book concludes with two remarkable documents: a chapter from Theodor W. Adorno's study of the relationship between religion and media in the context of political agitation (The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas's Radio Addresses) and a section from Niklas Luhmann's monumental Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Society as a Social System).