The Postmodern Sacred (original) (raw)
Related papers
Espaço e Cultura , 2018
Based on the post-1989 Cultural Geography studies and the Geographic studies of Religion, the present essay aimed to explore the relationship between religion and media in the age of 2.0, the age of social networks and the diffusion of media. In order to achieve this goal, we tried to understand how these new social relations occur through hypermodernity, which is characterized by the culture of excess, the intensification of values and a greater diversification of production aimed at consumption. We have also discussed how the process of development and propagation of the media and the cyberspace create new strategies for diffusion of faith. Through political, economic and local dimensions, we were able to understand the new connections between the sacred, the faith and the new dynamics of hypermodern society. The Roman Catholic Church in Brazil and the new spatial and territorial transformations through cyberspace and media are the empirical examples of the present research. Cultural Geography; Geography of Religion; hypermodernity; space; religion; media
The Resurgence of Religion in the Advent of Postmodernity
This paper argues that the postmodern prediction about the 'withering away' of religion in the postmodern setting is mistaken as religion has not faded away. The paper explains why the postmodern rejection of metanarratives does not apply to religion
Religion and the Postmodern in Contemporary North American Fiction
2014
Broadly speaking, postmodernist thinking presumes the failure of traditional value systems and epistemologies, reacting to this crisis in truth and knowledge with radical skepticism. This perspective privileges relativity over objective truth, interpretation over meaning, an infinity of multiple perspectives over unified systems of thought and belief, and concrete principles over abstract expressions. As Western religion insists upon exclusive universalized truths and principles, the persistence and even resurgence of religion and religious fundamentalism in a contemporary historical moment otherwise characterized by the pervasive influence of postmodernist tenets in secular life presents a striking paradox. The novels examined in this thesis all variously attempt to explain this apparent contradiction-how postmodern society seems to reject totalizing systems of knowledge and value, but encourages religion and its universalizing conceptions. In different ways, these novels frame religion as a pragmatic reaction to societal anxieties, rather than the result of divine revelation, emphasizing how beliefs morph in response to societal crises. They critique the concept of the religious grand narrative, demonstrating its susceptibility to change and its inability to provide a full story. Finally, these texts address what happens when traditional religious beliefs fail according to postmodern logic, and suggest that people engage the secular to replace the system of belief religion once provided. These novels suggest a human tendency to yearn for systems of belief but simultaneously deny any credibility to an overarching narrative, affirming postmodern society's attraction to multiplicity while still perhaps allowing for the human need for systems of knowledge and value.
Interfolding Religion and Media
Journal of Communication Inquiry, 2015
The central problem with religion and media is that neither works particularly well as an object of study. Both are terms that regularly break free of their tenuous disciplinary bounds and share the troubling tendency of interrupting the categories commonly used to analyze them. When taken together, religion and media do not tame each other but jump fields, blur, and demand a certain flexibility of vocabulary that can keep pace with the dynamic movement of these intertwined areas of inquiry. Our cultural landscapes repeatedly demonstrate the vitality of religious ways of thinking and living in a mediated world and the ways that media shape and inform religion. Some of the most productive recent scholarship insists, in fact, that religion is always mediated or even that religions are themselves media and, likewise, that religious logics cannot be extricated from the way media work (Stolow, 2005). It is the complex and diverse relationships of religion and media that this issue of the Journal of Communication Inquiry (JCI) examines, without any presumption that the terms in relationship will remain or ever were distinct. Religion and media, when taken together, undermine longstanding academic narratives of a clear separation between public and private, the institutional and the personal, online and offline. The acts of communication that constitute these dichotomies find in the confluence of religion and media a kind of distortion, a kind of play. At times, this leads to scholarly attempts to re-discipline these categories, including attempts to affix the categories of religion and media themselves to firm ground. But approaches that celebrate their vertiginous interfolding, such as the articles in this issue, can offer critical insights into the particular work that religion and media do. We live in a world in which memes of Rumi's Sufi poetry circulate as expressions of Christianity, in which worshippers reflexively silence their phones as they bow their heads, in which GPS algorithms divert attention from the temple on the side of the road, and, thus, in which the idea of online and offline as discrete states of being no longer makes much sense. We no longer log in to get online but carry our portals to the Internet in our pockets, and our phones search out Wi-Fi without us, just as our computers ping while we sleep. In this context, the performances of everyday lived religion, while intimate in scale, are rarely personal or private. They are enacted at home while scanning
Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal , 2013
This study argues that the jargon of inauthenticity in religious studies, which is characterised by references to 'fake', 'hyperreal' and 'invented' religions, is symptomatic of a crisis of method in the study of religion. In the historiography of the state, the term 'invented' signalled the emergence of practices and institutions that harnessed and limited modes of assembly through the development of technologies of government that marked a radical break with the past. In religious studies, although the term is taken to signal the emergence of new sites of religiosity, the idealist methods characteristic of phenomenology and Weberian sociology, which are typically used to study both them and the postmodern or late capitalist societies in which they have emerged, have generated an impoverished understanding of their significance. I argue that fake, hyperreal and invented religions can be situated as part of a shift in the sites of religion in the context of rapid postmodern transformation. Drawing from recent studies of such shifts in East Asian urban contexts, I argue that the real meaning of the new sites of religion lies not in allusions to simulations, hyperrealities or consumption, but as agentive nodes for generating new forms of public association and assembly.