Media, mediation, religion

While the global proliferation of new electronic media forms in recent decades has had a profound impact on many arenas of knowledge and practice, the effects of this process on religious traditions have been particularly striking, as a growing body of scholarship on this topic attests. Anthropologists working within a variety of religious contexts have explored how adherents of diverse religious traditions rework and redefine some of the fundamental norms of those traditions as they accommodate to the technological forms, discursive protocols and market values of globalising media infrastructures. The increasing reliance on mass media by practitioners of religious traditions has also coincided with the growing salience of religion as a social and political force, what some have referred to as the ‘return of the religious’. For the purpose of this exchange, I would like to consider one provocative and influential argument concerning the relationship between media and the religious in the contextofcontemporaryglobalisedmodernity.IntheIntroductiontohis2001co-edited