Searching for paradise: Libraries and media culture in the theological context
Mary Hess
Luther Seminary
www.luthersem.edu/mhess
Presented to the ATLA annual meeting, Portland, Oregon, June 28, 2003.
Please note: This presentation will be revised and published in the ATLA Proceedings.
Introduction
A year ago when I first accepted this gracious invitation we were in the midst of the run-up to the Iraq war, and the Bruce Springsteen album "The Rising" had just been released. I was struck by the album (all right, I'll admit it, I'm a big fan of Springsteen in general, and of this album in particular), but even more so by the public response to it. [image of the cover story "the gospel according to Bruce Springsteen" ]. There was a clear sense that this album was the first major piece of music to generate such a clear resonance nationally in light of the then upcoming September 11 anniversary. Perhaps the resonance itself--the biblical imagery, the resurrection language, etc.--would have been striking enough, but in the light of the build-up to the war and the increasingly problematic religious language coming out of Washington D. C., I was deeply touched by the fact that not one song on the album was nationalistic, and most of it had profound spiritual elements. One song on the album, entitled "Paradise," is what led to my title for this presentation.
In the time I have with you today I want to think out loud about this confluence of religious imagery and meaning-making within mass mediated popular culture.
I need to point out, up front, that I am a Roman Catholic layperson who teaches in an ELCA Lutheran seminary. This is important because I want to be clear about the location from which I come. What I offer today grows out of my work in this context, and out of my own faith journey. While I do intend to make some strong suggestions which I hope ATLA members will consider, I am very clear that these can not be prescriptive.
Let me give you a quick outline of the 5 points I'd like to make.
First, religious meaning-making, religious experience, is taking place in mass mediated culture, and that meaning-making shapes even those contexts where digital cultures are least apparent (in traditional worship, for instance).
Second, religious meaning-making is not only being produced and circulated in media cultures, but contested there, and in ways that are critically important to the world at large.
Third, this being the case, scholars of religion (both those in religious studies and those in seminaries) need to have access to the conceptual and analytical tools necessary to study popular culture, as well as to basic primary source materials.
Fourth, these tools, even the source materials, are increasingly being held in private hands, and even basic fair use access is being restricted. Librarians may well be the group most able to engage this challenge more generally, but theological librarians in particular, have a vital stake in it and important resources to bring to meeting the challenge.
Fifth, and finally, I'd like to lay in front of you a set of concrete challenges I hope you'll consider taking up.
Religious meaning-making takes place in mass mediated popular culture
Let me begin with the assertion that religious meaning-making, religious experience, is taking place in mass mediated popular culture. In order to sustain that assertion, I need to specify what I mean by "religious meaning-making and experience", and also say a little bit about mass mediated popular culture.
As a Catholic teaching in a Christian seminary, I will make this argument from within that context but hope that it might prove evocative beyond it.
First of all, Christian religious knowing is at heart both affective as well as intellectual. It is a kind of knowing that structures religious experience relationally. This is a form of knowing that connects one's deepest sense of self to a set of beliefs and language that have explicit roots in a religious community. Here I would point to the work of Catherine La Cugna, (1991), Elizabeth Johnson (1992), Roberto Goizueta (1995), and all the other contemporary Christian theologians who are arguing that our relationality is fundamentally constitutive of our identity.
Parker Palmer's shorthand for this, is that "we know as we are known" (1993). Because I find Palmer's insights so helpful, let me also share one of his diagrams with you (1998). [point to diagram] In these two images Palmer is contrasting two very different epistemological strategies, and their pedagogical implementation. In the first, knowledge is something that experts "attain" from an object, and which they then "pass on" to amateurs. Note that the arrows point in only one direction, and Palmer uses baffles to denote, visually, the inability of information to flow in the other direction. This is a very linear process, one in which it is easy to see that the "expert" is essentially an instrument by which meaning is conveyed.
His second image is highly interdependent and interwoven. In this model for knowing, everyone is directly in relationship with the "subject" at the heart of the exploration, and also--at the same time--in relationship with everyone/thing else. No one location can "corner the market," if you will, on the knowledge being constructed, and isolating knowers can have a deadly effect on the overall tensegrity of knowing.
Palmer uses this image to talk about contrasting forms of knowing, and the learning and teaching strategies that accompany them, but the fascinating thing about this image is that it also speaks clearly to a paradigm shift in the way in which scholars understand how media--particularly mass media -- "work," not to mention the ways in which religious institutions (particularly Christian churches) have understood the relationship between church and culture.
In the past, particularly in the American research context, a lot of ink has been spilled describing mass media as instrumental conduits, as pipelines, if you will, piping messages that have been produced directly into the passive minds and hearts of the "amateurs," or in this case, audiences, at the other end of the pipelines. Another metaphor that has been used is one of "trucks carrying cargo," where the cargo consists of messages produced by media institutions (Hess, 1999).
That metaphor was seductive in many ways, because it allowed many religious institutions to conceive of the mass media as a broad new ground for supporting evangelization. Such a model suggests that using the mass media would be particularly efficient. Even churches for whom evangelization is a much more contested idea invested in this model, because it made it possible to clearly identify a "problem"--negative messages being piped directly into unsuspecting brains--and propose appropriate solutions. In this latter case, the solution generally proposed was to inoculate people against negative content, either by turning off the spigots (boycotting tv and film, for instance) or teaching them to read appropriately (to deconstruct) the messages.
Can you see, though, how in both cases--the evangelism example and the media inoculation example--churches demonstrate this very instrumental understanding of mass media?
New research suggests that that model does not adequately describe the practices people engage in with mass media. Instead, scholars are taking a "culturalist" turn, and talking about the ways in which people engage mass media through ritualized practices (think super bowl), and as a cultural database, if you will, upon which people draw. In this more recent model [show Palmer image again]--there is clearly some central knowledge, truth, reality at the heart of our knowing, but there are now many knowers accessing the database, and sharing with each other as well as with the database, in their knowing.
Religious institutions need to pick up on this paradigm shift because it helps us to understand the contexts we now inhabit. Adán Medrano, noted videographer and producer, writes that part of our problem within the Christian churches is that we have tended to assume that "Œmedia' and Œthe church' are distinct, bounded, separate realities." That they somehow "exist as two separate worlds," and that while media might be "necessary to the church so that we can deliver a message" the ultimate "meaning of the messages is determined by the producer" (Medrano, 1998).
The new model helps us to see that, instead, whether we like it or not, religious practice and media practice have "conflated into each other and now share the same spaces." As Medrano writes, "we encounter religious experience in everyday culture, and it is in everyday media culture that our religious myths and symbols come alive. It is in media culture that we create our identities of who we are, who God is, and how we should live" (1998). There are numerous scholars writing about these practices, but I thought it might be kind of fun to give you some examples. Some are very obvious, carrying explicit Christian references.
An episode of West Wing, for instance:
[excerpt from an episode entitled "Shibboleth," taped by the author off of broadcast television on November 22, 2000]
or the VeggieTales phenomenon
[excerpt from "King George and His Ducky," BigIdea Productions, http://www.bigidea.com/]
Others work off of themes that can float across multiple genres. Here I think of the Bruce Springsteen album I noted earlier, or U2's song "Grace." Each of these can be "read" through a Christian lens, but they can also be "read" as referring to other things.
[play U2 song]
Any of you who have ever had the experience of preaching know that the moment when meaning is created exists somewhere between when the words leave your mouth and the person hearing you takes them in. Sure, they heard your words, but what is made of them can vary dramatically.
This dynamic, fluid element of meaning-making can be difficult for religious institutions to grasp, particularly those elements of institutions (religious educators, for instance) whose primary aim is to pass on specific interpretations of religion.
Religious meaning-making is a process of contestation
As I mentioned earlier, there is an enormous amount of contestation taking place in mass mediated popular culture right now. There probably always is! But with fear at a new high, and political language taking on all sorts of direct apocalyptic and other religious overtones, religious institutions--theologians and educators in particular!--need to be in the middle of this process, acting as interpreters, if you will, picking up on religious resonances that exist in popular culture, connecting them with the narrative streams of our communities, helping people to identify the allusions being made and highlighting particular references. I have written about this elsewhere (Hess, forthcoming), so I won't belabor the point, but let me give you two further examples.
The first is a commercial that on the face of it has nothing to do with religion, but attend to the language embedded in itŠ
[Apple commercial entitled "Nava"]
"You and I must make a pact, we must bring salvation back, where there is love, I'll be thereŠ"
This is an old Michael Jackson song, but I think it's interesting that this is the small snippet Apple uses. And that the illustration they use with it is a young woman enjoying music, and enjoying her performance of it. For me, at least--and I grant you, media interpretation, for all of the reasons I've noted earlier, varies greatly!--this piece evokes a deep relationality, and love.
Of course, it also explicitly intends to stimulate a purchase, it seeks to have the audience participate in this meaning-making by buying a song. I doubt that any of us would argue that Christian theology ought ever to promote consumer commodification.
And yetŠ and yetŠ there is so much dynamism, so much interpolation of meaningŠ if there is no directly separated "sacred" and no directly separated "secular" (let alone profane), perhaps it is not so far off to consider that this commercial might invite constructive religious meaning-making through engagement with it.
On a different note, but yet connected, Christian communities rightly fear their messages becoming commodified. But we are ourselves often the source of that commodification. One of the most trenchant critiques of the process of consumer commodification in religious institutions that I've encountered comes fromŠ where? The Simpsons. Take a look at this clip:
[excerpt from an episode of The Simpsons taped from television broadcast on December 25, 2001, entitled "She of Little Faith"]
This episode aired on Christmas Day in 2001 (and no doubt at other times as well, given the rerun system). But consider this: an episode that directly engages consumer commodification of religious meaning-making aired on Christmas Day.
This is perhaps a more trivial illustration, but let me juxtapose two other illustrations of religious meaning-making that come from within recent mass mediated culture.
The first is a small excerpt of an event that took place on Sept. 14, 2001.
[show excerpt from "A Day of Prayer and Remembrance," taped from broadcast television, ABC on September 14, 2001.]
This second clip is taken from an event that took place on Sept. 21, 2001.
[show excerpt from "A Tribute to Our Heroes," taken from the VHS commercial recording]
Again, mediated pieces are always open to multiple interpretations. Here is just a brief glimpse of my own interpretation in relation to these two pieces. I think the first one conflates Protestant Christianity with nationalist patriotism. I think the second one suggests American identity is not a melting pot, but a rich stew of varied religious practices opposed to vengeance.
Even if you don't agree with me--and many of you won't!--I hope you can at least see that there is a "contest" of sorts taking place over what it means to be religious, and over what that identity calls one to, in the middle of mass mediated popular culture.
Librarians need to give scholars access to these materialsŠ
Given what I've said thus far - both about religious knowing more generally, and the characteristics of mass media more specifically--I hope you will be convinced that religious scholars--both those who study religious communities as distanced outsiders, and those who study to serve within those communities--need to have access to the conceptual and analytical tools necessary to study mass mediated popular culture, as well as to basic primary source materials.
We need to be able to participate in this active debate, in this fluid construction of religious knowing. We need to be a player in the dialogue that draws on--and contributes to!--these cultural databases. It's very difficult to do that if we, as scholars, are unaware of them, trivialize them, or simply ignore them. I believe libraries have traditionally been both the repository of materials for scholarly study, but also, more crucially, the informed guides that lead us to reference materials, archives and so on. Can you hear my call to your skills here?
As librarians I suspect you are aware of the ever increasing range of resources available in this area. Resources like the Media, Religion and Culture books (Hoover&Lundby, 1997), (Hoover&Clark, 2002), (Mitchell&Marriage, 2003), the websites (http://www.jmcommunications.com/english/commissionindex.html, http://www.colorado.edu/Journalism/MEDIALYF/, http://www.colorado.edu/Journalism/mcm/mct.htm, the cd-roms (Horsfield, ), (Medrano, 2000), the conferences (cf. http://www.louisville.edu/org/mrac/), and so on. In fact, my hunch is that among you are people I'd love to talk with, who could lead me to resources I haven't discovered yet. This is an important challenge, but there is yet a more difficult, more pressing challenge that I believe librarians such as yourselves are uniquely qualified to help us meet.
This study and engagement needs ongoing access, and that access is being shut downŠ
Right now there is another war being waged in the U.S.--and also globally. I'm not sure this war has a catchy name associated with it, and it's not always easy to identify the "sides" in the conflict. But the war I am referring to is intimately bound up in the challenge of studying mass mediated popular culture. That is, the war over who has access to and control over digital materials.
More and more of mass mediated popular culture exists in digital form. Television, radio, film, mass market magazines are just a few examples of digitally produced media. And that doesn't even touch on the Internet, the web, and the rest of the born-digital information ecosystem.
There have been a number of battles fought in this war quite recently, and those of us who care about relational knowing, those of us who care about having multiple and diverse voices present at the table, those of us who believe that we are fundamentally relational creatures, we are losing these battles.
Consider recent federal legislation. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act is perhaps one of the most disastrous of these laws, but the Patriot Act followed it up by making it more likely the federal government would enter private library records without the patrons even knowing they had been accessed.
Three weeks ago the Federal Communications Commission ruled that media consolidation could continue unabated. And last January the Supreme Court ruled against Eric Eldred's attempt to reopen the border of the public domain (cf. http://eldred.cc/).
All of these laws and decisions can be contested, but the reality is that we're losing ground in the process. Even the changes enacted to expand Fair Use to digital materials don't really impact the deeper problems that attend a medium that can be licensed, rather than simply protected by copyright.
We've lost these skirmishes, and the next battleground moves deeper into our territory, as people like Sen. Hatch propose hardware "solutions" that would enable media industry owners to reach down through electronic lines and "bomb" computers that appear to have illegal materials on them. As Lawrence Lessig pointed out so eloquently in his book Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace, while many people believe the Internet's architecture prevents hijacking by private, commercial concerns and thus is "safe" in some way, others are very effectively moving in to change its architecture on the deep level of infrastructure, coding out decentralization, and coding in the prerogatives of big industries.
Decisions such as whether to regulate broad band Internet access with a "cable" set of rules (in which case pipeline owners typically control content moving over such access) or with a "phone system" set of rules (in which case pipelines owners are explicitly prohibited from controlling content), are being reached largely outside of public conversation and debate.
I would suspect that in most theological schools, at least if they're like mine, people don't even know that these debates are occurring, let alone that they could have enormously destructive consequences for religious meaning-making.
We--as sinful human beings--can never fully know where and how God may be revealed to us. But for just a moment, imagine that God might be revealing Godself in the middle of mass mediated popular culture. And imagine that the next generation of theologians will be those who interpret these cultural productions, who "read the signs of the times," so to speak. How will they do so if they can not even bring such materials into churches, into seminary classrooms, if they cannot playfully improvise with the various data to be found in these vast cultural databases?
There has been tremendous industry outcry over the huge amount of music downloading that has taken place over the Net. People decry the immorality of youth, and bemoan the perceived lack of ethics that has young people sharing a whole range of cultural materials in digital format with each other, blithely ignoring the commercial prerogatives of such wholesale sharing. But how often have we wondered whether in fact such sharing might be an essential element of human narrative creation? And how often have theologians pondered the ethics at the heart of such sharing? Perhaps theologians, after such study, would still find much to condemn. I certainly believe that artists are entitled to recognition for their work, and for appropriate payment.
But right now most of the payment for such cultural production doesn't go to the artists, but instead to the industries of distribution. As Lawrence Lessig noted recently, "The RIAA is the Recording Industry Association of America. It is not the Recording Industry and Artists Association of America. It says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle" (The Filter, 5.9). There are fewer and fewer corporations owning more and more of that distribution capacity. This is not healthy. It is not healthy for a democracy, and it is certainly not healthy for a community of faith.
Rather than supporting a system, an infrastructure, that seeks to build unity through imposed sameness, we need to support a system that invites unity through diversity. And doing so means getting involved in the very real decisions that are being made right now about how we will engage meaning-making, how we will know, in the cultures we are creating together.
I don't think that it is a coincidence that a film like The Matrix, here I'm thinking of the original one in particular, should be so caught up at heart with an exploration of what is real, and should come to climax as its main character is "resurrected" by the kiss of a woman named Trinity.
Nor do I think it's a coincidence that a generation of people confronted with the evident hypocrisy and structural deceptions of various churches, should turn to a "secular" film to finally find evidence that the Christ story has narrative resonance for them.
As Margaret Miles notes, "the representation and examination of values and moral commitments does not presently occur most pointedly in churches, synagogues, or mosques, but before the eyes of Œcongregations' in movie theaters. North Americans--even those with religious affiliations--now gather about cinema and television screens rather than in churches to ponder the moral quandaries of American life" (1996, p. 25).
Are we going to leave such pondering to float only within the frames created by mass media content producers? Are we going to continue to rely only upon the data their search engine makes accessible to us? Or are we going to learn how to improvise? Both with the data available there, and beyond it with data that we produce ourselves?
Recently Jed Horovitz produced an evocative commentary on one of the more lucrative battles that big media companies are currently waging against cultural improvisers. Titled "Willful Infringement," this DVD provides multiple examples of ways in which culture is always about making new things out of old ones. Disney would not be in the position it currently holds, for instance, able to successfully lobby to extend copyright protection so far into the future, had such protection existed when it began its efforts in animation.
Consider just this clip from Willful Infringement:
[excerpt from the DVD]
I have probably broken some kind of regulation or law by showing you this clip, but could I have made my argument as well without it?
Religious meaning-making is no different. As Mary Boys writes, religious education is "the making accessible of the traditions of the religious community and the making manifest of the intrinsic connection between traditions and transformation (1989, 193)."
And as Terrence Tilley points out,
"... tradita alone do not carry the tradition. ... the greater the difference between the context in which the traditor learned the tradition and the context in which the tradition is transmitted, the greater the possibility that a shift in tradita may be necessary to communicate the tradition. Paradoxically, fidelity to a tradition may sometimes involve extensive reworking of the tradita" (Tilley, 2000, p. 29).
If we are serious, both about giving people access to our traditions as well as the deep understanding of how they are always in a process of transformation, then we will need to learn to improvise, we will need to learn to "shift the Œtradita'" sufficiently. And that process will require that we work with the cultural databases around us. Doing so will mean that we need to play with digital media, and most pertinently for this argument, with things from within mass mediated popular culture contexts; to "rip, mix, burn" as Apple puts it.
This kind of improvisation is so crucial that I want to lift up a few additional reasons in support of it from within a Christian theological framework. I'm sure there are also many reasons that would be compelling within other frames, but as those are not the primary context in which I work I'll leave those arguments to others.
I have three from within Christian theology that I would lift up in particular.
First, as I noted earlier, we believe in a God who is within Godself most essentially relational. We believe in a God who is Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier. A God who knows us through relationship, and thus whom we know through relationship. If our knowing is so thoroughly relational, and if that relationality is produced, circulated, negotiated and contested within cultural contexts pervaded by popular culture, than it is constitutive of ourselves in relation to engage that culture (Brown, et. al., 2001, 5).
Following from that, then, one of the central heartbeats of Christianity--for both better and worse--has been our sending out into the world. "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations" writes the author of the Gospel of Matthew, in chapter 28. This is an imperative for mission. Yet one of the deep consequences of a relational epistemology is both a clear recognition of the ways in which we have lived out that mission quite destructively in some contexts, as well as a renewed challenge to try again. In other words, we are drawn into mission not because we seek to impose our beliefs on others, but because we know, deep in our souls, that we can only really know what we believe with as wide and deep a matrix of knowers as possible. Indeed, our sacred narrative invites us to move outward in the deep humility of a pilgrim on a journey of transformation. We are invited to "try out" our beliefs with other people in other contexts not to prove our interpretation, but in fact to risk it. Mass mediated popular cultures are just some among the many in which we seek to learn.
Third, there are powerful issues of distributive and social justice being contested in the middle of the mass media right now. I have mentioned some of the more obvious in terms of access to forms of knowing, but there are many others--issues concerning the ever widening digital divide, issues involving the sustained promotion of policies of consumption that make the US "20 percent of the world's population who uses 67 percent of the world's resources and generates 75 percent of its pollution," (Kingsolver, 2002, 113) and so on. Many of these issues are "masked" in some ways because the cultural databases we draw on are often narrow and limited. It is not simply that religious communities need to improvise with popular culture to engage positive forms of revelation occurring there, but also that we need to be trenchant critics of the narrowness of the databases, we need to have sufficient imagination to see what is beyond the confines of the dominant frame. What lies outside Google?
What can ATLA do about this?
So what can ATLA member libraries do about this? Like any difficult challenge, there are numerous possible responses, and no one institution will be able to handle all of them. But here is a list I'd like each of you, personally and as institutional representatives, to consider. Maybe there's only one thing on this list that you can manage to implement. Small steps are important! I hope that this list might also spark you to ideas that haven't occurred to me. That is, after all, part of the benefit of relational approaches to knowing.
To begin with, one easy step would be to bring these issues into community prayer. There is probably no more central way into a community's heart, than through its prayers.
Similarly, I would invite those of you who preach in worship at your institutions to consider studying the texts you might be engaging to see what insight they could challenge us with in relation to these issues.
I think seminaries in particular, but religious and theological studies programs more generally, ought to take a strong open source stance. "Open source" may have begun as a label applied to software developed in the open by volunteers, but it is rapidly moving beyond that context into many other kinds of development. Take a look at the "Creative commons" for some ideas (http://creativecommons.org/).
Sign on to the "take back the public domain" petition, available at : http://www.petitiononline.com/eldred/petition.html. It doesn't take much to sign a petition, but it's a place to start. And once started, there are so many other possibilities!
While you're at it, sign on to the Budapest Open Access Initiative (http://www.soros.org/openaccess/). The Association of College and Research Libraries has. Several universities have. Why haven't any seminaries? This is a question I need to pose at my own.
We can make clear policy choices within our institutions to support open source solutions. Some of these may already be evolving, given the economic challenges we face with the ever-increasing price for licensing proprietary software. But I think that beyond the immediate "bottom line" calculations, we need to be ready to support open source work even if it's difficult, even if it costs more in the short term, even if we find ourselves becoming less efficient in some ways. It may be less efficient in some ways, but if the process of development involves a wider range of people, and creates tools and other resources that are easily circulated, than it will be worth it. We can use Linux-based servers, for instance, instead of Microsoft servers. We can deliberately develop computer resources that begin and remain open source.
Open source ideas also push far beyond the IT arena. We can advocate for and implement policies that keep course resources developed at our institutions free and in the open, in publicly accessible places. The Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/) has developed a variety of legal language for making this easier to do, and their website is rich in examples of other organizations and individuals who are moving in this direction. MIT's Open Courseware is perhaps the most famous example of this kind of initiative.
Obviously there ought to be some exceptions to making course content public--the conversations that occur within a class between teacher and students, for instance--but aside from such exceptions, our theological reasons to do so ought to override even economic ones not to. The Disseminary (http://www.disseminary.org/), born through the wise innovation of A.K.M. Adams at Seabury Western, is one example of an institution trying to do this within the theological context. Why aren't more theological institutions leading the way? Or at least following?
Further, we can move beyond just course content and support scholarly and research resources kept publicly and in the open. Here again the Disseminary provides a nice example. But why aren't more of our core peer reviewed journals moving to this model? The Rowe.com fiasco has made this past year particularly painful for the business of academic serials publishing. Maybe it's time to take a leap beyond that model completely. It is highly problematic to me that the bulk of religious resources available on the web have little or no provenance from established religious institutions. We are dragging our feet entirely too slowly in this arena, and ought to be out front, rather than stumbling along behind. Let's build the theological "Dspace" (http://www.dspace.org/)!
Chris Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger listed very persuasively in The Cluetrain Manifesto (http://www.cluetrain.com/) a set of 95 theses in relation to the burgeoning Net community. Their first thesis is that "markets are conversations," and their second is that "markets consist of human beings." There is a huge conversation going on out there, that we in religious institutions ought to be a part of. Now is the time to take some risks and believe enough in what we're doing to move beyond the old distribution models and into the new--particularly when those models support human relationality.
Most of the ATLA institutions represented here are much more directly connected to actual living breathing communities of practice than much of academe is. We ought to be able to lead the way here, our convictions ought to be drawing us outward rather than creating yet more barriers behind which we keep our ever more irrelevant knowledge. Note: I don't believe religious knowing is irrelevant at all, but I believe that institutionalized religious knowing, kept rigidly in linear, instrumental frameworks of "experts" and "amateurs," does become so.
What might it look like if even just one faculty, student or staff member of each of our institutions maintained a weblog linked to the Disseminary, for instance? Don't have any idea what a weblog is? Then that's your homework for the day--go out and read a few. You can find some basic links at: http://www.luthersem.edu/mhess/weblogs.html
What might it look like if basic media education and technological literacy were a part of all of our faculty, staff and student development efforts? The number of theological schools--particularly in the mainline Christian denominations--who support varieties of media engagement has actually gone down over the last two decades, rather than increased. We may be adding digital capabilities to our institutions, but we are having a hard time using those capabilities to explore media cultures.
Finally--in the context of our own institutions--we ought to be ensuring that our websites are fully accessible. Here I am ashamed to admit that my own is not. It regularly fails the Bobby test. It is one of my goals for this summer to redesign the code on my site so that it can be easily accessed by the multitude of people living with various challenges. The web in its initial design made such accessibility elegantly possible. We have since begun to close it down. We need to turn that around.
These are just a few ideas. I hope and pray that you will have more. There is no institution better situated to engage these issues in the religious context than an association of theological libraries! You are the people who understand these issues, you are the people with the education and awareness to help the rest of us figure them out.
I pray that you will, because I fear that if we do not ... we will risk more than simply institutional irrelevance. We will risk turning away from active engagement with our living, breathing, incarnate and ever revealing God.
Thank you.
References
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