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Went to an interesting panel discussion tonight on Media and Religion, hosted by the Media Ecology Association (in honor of its 5th birthday – happy birthday, MEA!). Came away from the evening with my mental gears a-crankin’:

Something that none of the panelists touched explicitly on is the fact that religion has been defined by many scholars as an institution through which people come to terms with the experience of the “numinous” (a term from Otto that roughly means a sense of awe and humility inspired by that which is unknowable or not understandable by humans, kind of like that feeling you get when you look into the night sky and are overwhelmed by the immensity of the universe), where the “holy” or “sacred” (via Eliade) is the space which is marked off for the mysterium tremendum that constitutes the numinous.

So, it seems to me that one of the interesting points at which media scholars might engage with the study of religion is with this idea of the numinous, which is something that fundamentally cannot be represented. If religion relies in part on something that by its nature can’t be represented, then interesting questions can be raised about the role of religion in an increasingly mediated society that is moving toward an “all media, all the time” experience. Are the two in opposition, the media which strive to represent everything and the religion that relies in part on something being unrepresentable? Ot is the nature of religion itself shifting, becoming less about the numinous and more about identity and community?

Douglas Rushkoff pointed toward this in his remarks tonight, indicating that for him religion is a wonderful thing, embodying the ideals of transparency, literacy and community which he’d hoped to find in the new media culture of the early 1990′s – at least, it’s a wonderful thing until it becomes a religion. In other words, according to Rushkoff, religion is great until it engages with the numinous or the holy, at which point it loses some of its luster.

The interesting thing is that several of the other panelists tonight seemed to fundamentally disagree, from Paul Levinson who believed that our experience of the numinous could drive our society to push the frontiers of outer space exploration in ways that business or nationalistic imperatives couldn’t, to Read Mercer Schuchardt’s defense of religion (and the humility before the numinous which it brings) as a safer and less destructive means to organize society than secular politics.

In the end, it was a rich discussion, though far too short to delve as deeply into the material as I’d have liked, and without any real resolution on these issues (much less on how they might connect to the media ecological approach to the study of technology and social institutions like religion). Lots of possibilities for future thought, which I suppose is the ideal way to celebrate the birthday of an academic organization just growing out of its toddler years.

Comments 2 Comments so far. Leave a comment below.

Darlene,

March 15, 2004 at 3:49 am

As a student from Santa Clara University, I took a class called Media and Religion. The text for the class was a book called “a matrix of meanings; finding God in Pop Culture” by Craig Detweiler and Barry Taylor. I found the book a good welcoming into the subject.

Darlene,

March 15, 2004 at 3:50 am

As a student from Santa Clara University, I took a class called Media and Religion. The text for the class was a book called “a matrix of meanings; finding God in Pop Culture” by Craig Detweiler and Barry Taylor. I found the book a good welcoming into the subject.

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