Pub Date : 2015-05-14DOI: 10.1163/21659214-90000102
Margaret M. Mullan
This article explores the nature of Catholic identity, as constructed in a Catholic social media site, PhatMass. This study, a month-long virtual ethnography of PhatMass, took place during the significant global Catholic event in February to March of 2013—the former Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation and the new Pope Francis’s election. James Carey’s (1989) ritual view of communication sheds light on PhatMass participant engagement with social media, popular culture, and Catholic identity during these online discussions. The findings from this ethnography indicate that religion, media, and popular culture meet in the religious, media-using, culture participant who communicates, consumes, or creates meaning through daily ritual on technology. The blend of pop culture content and traditional Catholic beliefs on PhatMass reveals a broader Catholic identity emerging online. The PhatMass conversation provides details about how Catholic identity formation takes place in a world increasingly marked by online communication
{"title":"Constructing an Identity Online: Logging-On as “Catholic”","authors":"Margaret M. Mullan","doi":"10.1163/21659214-90000102","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/21659214-90000102","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the nature of Catholic identity, as constructed in a Catholic social media site, PhatMass. This study, a month-long virtual ethnography of PhatMass, took place during the significant global Catholic event in February to March of 2013—the former Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation and the new Pope Francis’s election. James Carey’s (1989) ritual view of communication sheds light on PhatMass participant engagement with social media, popular culture, and Catholic identity during these online discussions. The findings from this ethnography indicate that religion, media, and popular culture meet in the religious, media-using, culture participant who communicates, consumes, or creates meaning through daily ritual on technology. The blend of pop culture content and traditional Catholic beliefs on PhatMass reveals a broader Catholic identity emerging online. The PhatMass conversation provides details about how Catholic identity formation takes place in a world increasingly marked by online communication","PeriodicalId":142820,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture","volume":"32 5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116628540","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2014-12-06DOI: 10.1163/21659214-90000054
Amber M. Stamper
For evangelicals, the allure of mass media evangelism has always been the potential to reach ever-more-distant “unsaved” populations across the globe. However, as the print and broadcast revolutions quickly revealed, targeting individuals’ needs and developing a sense of personal intimacy between evangelists and audience via these media proved a perpetual challenge. The digital revolution transformed this relationship: the interactive capabilities of the Internet and the ability to inexpensively target niche audiences re-shaped mass media evangelism. However, a close examination of evangelistic practices online reveals that, in fact, this latest “revolution” — rather than representing entirely novel ground — actually more closely approximates the type of evangelism that has taken place in brick and mortar churches and non-virtual environments since Christianity’s origins. The concept of “rhetorical space” — drawn from rhetorician Roxanne Mountford’s work on how the design of pulpits and church buildings directly impacts the types of pastoral and congregational behaviors promoted — helps us to see why. Using Global Media Outreach’s Jesus2020.com and The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s PeacewithGod.net web sites as exemplars, I explore how, by conceptualizing evangelistic websites as rhetorical spaces with architectural features functioning persuasively in a manner similar to physical spaces, scholars of digital religion gain a theoretical framework for effectively describing the unique draw of these sites. Three elements of design in particular reveal how web design works imperceptibly to create a personalized, intimate, and interactive experience, while quickly moving users to make the decision to convert: the rhetorics of interface, navigation, and virtual relationship design. Understanding evangelistic websites as rhetorical spaces thus allows scholars of digital religion to see ways in which Internet evangelism has many similarities with evangelism in non-virtual spaces, pushing us to view it as a more familiar and historical strategy than is commonly recognized.
{"title":"Building the Narrow Gate: Digital Decisions for Christ and the Draw of Rhetorical Space","authors":"Amber M. Stamper","doi":"10.1163/21659214-90000054","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/21659214-90000054","url":null,"abstract":"For evangelicals, the allure of mass media evangelism has always been the potential to reach ever-more-distant “unsaved” populations across the globe. However, as the print and broadcast revolutions quickly revealed, targeting individuals’ needs and developing a sense of personal intimacy between evangelists and audience via these media proved a perpetual challenge. The digital revolution transformed this relationship: the interactive capabilities of the Internet and the ability to inexpensively target niche audiences re-shaped mass media evangelism. However, a close examination of evangelistic practices online reveals that, in fact, this latest “revolution” — rather than representing entirely novel ground — actually more closely approximates the type of evangelism that has taken place in brick and mortar churches and non-virtual environments since Christianity’s origins. The concept of “rhetorical space” — drawn from rhetorician Roxanne Mountford’s work on how the design of pulpits and church buildings directly impacts the types of pastoral and congregational behaviors promoted — helps us to see why. Using Global Media Outreach’s Jesus2020.com and The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s PeacewithGod.net web sites as exemplars, I explore how, by conceptualizing evangelistic websites as rhetorical spaces with architectural features functioning persuasively in a manner similar to physical spaces, scholars of digital religion gain a theoretical framework for effectively describing the unique draw of these sites. Three elements of design in particular reveal how web design works imperceptibly to create a personalized, intimate, and interactive experience, while quickly moving users to make the decision to convert: the rhetorics of interface, navigation, and virtual relationship design. Understanding evangelistic websites as rhetorical spaces thus allows scholars of digital religion to see ways in which Internet evangelism has many similarities with evangelism in non-virtual spaces, pushing us to view it as a more familiar and historical strategy than is commonly recognized.","PeriodicalId":142820,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture","volume":"83 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128616812","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2014-12-06DOI: 10.1163/21659214-90000044
Lisa Kienzl
Portrayals of mediumship in modern Western television narratives need to be seen as part of a broader phenomenon of the presence of religious elements in Western media, a phenomenon I argue expresses a longing for grand narratives in contemporary Western society. The portrayal and mediatization of religious elements in television narratives as well as their discussion in digital fan culture are part of what I would call a transformation process of knowledge and in particular knowledge of religious phenomena. More specifically, digital fan culture allows for an engagement with discursive transformation processes of knowledge and thus influences what is perceived as knowledge in society. Therefore, religious studies needs to pay closer attention to television narratives and the way fans interact with these narratives to create knowledge about religious practices. This article focuses on how the elements of “possession” and “mediumship” are being transformed by the US TV series Supernatural and its fan culture. I argue that we can see at least two transformation processes here: the transformation and transplantation of religious concepts and practices (in the case of this article the idea of the human body as spirit medium) into a television context , and the transformation of these concepts and practices through digital fan culture. In its discussion of fan culture, the article looks at and analyzes fan based websites and how they present, discuss and imagine the body-medium.
{"title":"\"You're My True Vessel\": Knowledge and Digital Fan Culture Discussed on the Basis of Mediumship and Possession in Supernatural's Narrative and Fandom","authors":"Lisa Kienzl","doi":"10.1163/21659214-90000044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/21659214-90000044","url":null,"abstract":"Portrayals of mediumship in modern Western television narratives need to be seen as part of a broader phenomenon of the presence of religious elements in Western media, a phenomenon I argue expresses a longing for grand narratives in contemporary Western society. The portrayal and mediatization of religious elements in television narratives as well as their discussion in digital fan culture are part of what I would call a transformation process of knowledge and in particular knowledge of religious phenomena. More specifically, digital fan culture allows for an engagement with discursive transformation processes of knowledge and thus influences what is perceived as knowledge in society. Therefore, religious studies needs to pay closer attention to television narratives and the way fans interact with these narratives to create knowledge about religious practices. This article focuses on how the elements of “possession” and “mediumship” are being transformed by the US TV series Supernatural and its fan culture. I argue that we can see at least two transformation processes here: the transformation and transplantation of religious concepts and practices (in the case of this article the idea of the human body as spirit medium) into a television context , and the transformation of these concepts and practices through digital fan culture. In its discussion of fan culture, the article looks at and analyzes fan based websites and how they present, discuss and imagine the body-medium.","PeriodicalId":142820,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131883251","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2014-12-06DOI: 10.1163/21659214-90000051
Mads T. F. Damgaard
Marshalling scientific arguments and methods for religious ends is certainly not a new trend in religious expressions, but new modes of writing scientifically legitimated myths has developed online. Computer-mediated communication provides new tools for such a fusing of religion and science, and the present article asks what this entails for categories of religious authority and authenticity. Taking online expressions of the Neo-Pagan faith called Asatru, a 9,500 year-old skeleton and an associated modern North American conspiracy theory as the starting points, a configuration of religious authenticity derived from scientific sources is analysed. The case is made that through hyperlinks, YouTube videos and discussion forums, religious communities such as the online Asatru groups strategically assemble religious authority on a foundation of science, tapping into non-religious ecologies of knowledge available online. This puts into question theoretical premises such as notions of the secular and differentiation of rationalities. Research in CMC and religion, it is argued, must take into consideration the specific hybrid knowledges facilitated by online structures and technologies.
{"title":"Sacralizing Reality Digitally: YouTruths, Kennewick Claims and the First Americans","authors":"Mads T. F. Damgaard","doi":"10.1163/21659214-90000051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/21659214-90000051","url":null,"abstract":"Marshalling scientific arguments and methods for religious ends is certainly not a new trend in religious expressions, but new modes of writing scientifically legitimated myths has developed online. Computer-mediated communication provides new tools for such a fusing of religion and science, and the present article asks what this entails for categories of religious authority and authenticity. Taking online expressions of the Neo-Pagan faith called Asatru, a 9,500 year-old skeleton and an associated modern North American conspiracy theory as the starting points, a configuration of religious authenticity derived from scientific sources is analysed. The case is made that through hyperlinks, YouTube videos and discussion forums, religious communities such as the online Asatru groups strategically assemble religious authority on a foundation of science, tapping into non-religious ecologies of knowledge available online. This puts into question theoretical premises such as notions of the secular and differentiation of rationalities. Research in CMC and religion, it is argued, must take into consideration the specific hybrid knowledges facilitated by online structures and technologies.","PeriodicalId":142820,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115883813","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2014-12-06DOI: 10.1163/21659214-90000052
Oriol Poveda
Through a case study of the Facebook page of a Jewish Orthodox environmental project based in Germany, this paper explores the ways in which religion and modernity might be made compatible and what role digital media plays in such interaction. On the basis of the empirical material gathered for this paper, the author presents a typology of religious-environmental processes of hybridization. The analysis draws from the concepts of multiple modernities, public religions and religious branding in order to discuss whether the combination of religion and modernity is enabled or compromised by the collapsing of boundaries between the public sphere and the marketplace in late modern societies. The findings suggest that Facebook and its affordances make possible the particular intersections of religion and environmentalism, of public sphere and marketplace, that are characteristic of the case under study.
{"title":"Greening Religion in Facebook: Can Digital Media Bridge the Gap Between Religion and Modernity?","authors":"Oriol Poveda","doi":"10.1163/21659214-90000052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/21659214-90000052","url":null,"abstract":"Through a case study of the Facebook page of a Jewish Orthodox environmental project based in Germany, this paper explores the ways in which religion and modernity might be made compatible and what role digital media plays in such interaction. On the basis of the empirical material gathered for this paper, the author presents a typology of religious-environmental processes of hybridization. The analysis draws from the concepts of multiple modernities, public religions and religious branding in order to discuss whether the combination of religion and modernity is enabled or compromised by the collapsing of boundaries between the public sphere and the marketplace in late modern societies. The findings suggest that Facebook and its affordances make possible the particular intersections of religion and environmentalism, of public sphere and marketplace, that are characteristic of the case under study.","PeriodicalId":142820,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture","volume":"82 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130314321","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2014-12-06DOI: 10.1163/21659214-90000050
S. Codone
Mainstream church leaders have taken to Twitter as a platform for spreading their message and promoting their churches. This study examines two American mega-church pastors, Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, and Andy Stanley of North Point Community Church in Atlanta, Georgia. The main objectives of this study are to analyse the Twitter activity of both pastors in an attempt to categorize their tweets according to research-based guidelines and to suggest new categories for ministry leaders who use social media. The study also tracks the Twitter activity over the life of the @rickwarren and @andystanley accounts. The study shows intriguing applications of Twitter by these two pastors and makes recommendations for those in ministry leadership who wish to use Twitter as a broadcast platform for their personal and ministry messages. Because research in ministerial use of social media is young, future studies are needed to determine if these recommendations can apply to the social media activity of other ministry leaders and to explore how ministry leaders across the religious spectrum are using social media.
{"title":"Megachurch Pastor Twitter Activity: An Analysis of Rick Warren and Andy Stanley, Two of America’s Social Pastors","authors":"S. Codone","doi":"10.1163/21659214-90000050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/21659214-90000050","url":null,"abstract":"Mainstream church leaders have taken to Twitter as a platform for spreading their message and promoting their churches. This study examines two American mega-church pastors, Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, and Andy Stanley of North Point Community Church in Atlanta, Georgia. The main objectives of this study are to analyse the Twitter activity of both pastors in an attempt to categorize their tweets according to research-based guidelines and to suggest new categories for ministry leaders who use social media. The study also tracks the Twitter activity over the life of the @rickwarren and @andystanley accounts. The study shows intriguing applications of Twitter by these two pastors and makes recommendations for those in ministry leadership who wish to use Twitter as a broadcast platform for their personal and ministry messages. Because research in ministerial use of social media is young, future studies are needed to determine if these recommendations can apply to the social media activity of other ministry leaders and to explore how ministry leaders across the religious spectrum are using social media.","PeriodicalId":142820,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129003383","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2014-12-06DOI: 10.1163/21659214-90000061
Bill Endres
This essay examines complexities that attend digitizing a cultural heritage artifact that is sacred to a contemporary community. It argues that scholars must first determine how the artifact participates in the life of its community. If this participation is integral, scholars should treat the artifact as a present-day cultural phenomenon, inseparable from its community. To explain the implications of this shift, the author turns to ethnography, which has a lengthy tradition of interacting with communities for generating research. Photographing a sacred artifact is not unlike other ethnographic research, whether tape recording stories, collecting documents, or gathering information about social practices. To guide digital work, the essay proposes ethnographic ethical principles, demonstrating their value in digitizing the 8th-century St Chad Gospels at Lichfield Cathedral, England — supporting Jamie Bianco's recent call for an "ethical turn" in the digital humanities.
{"title":"Imaging Sacred Artifacts: Ethics and the Digitizing of Lichfield Cathedral's St Chad Gospels","authors":"Bill Endres","doi":"10.1163/21659214-90000061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/21659214-90000061","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines complexities that attend digitizing a cultural heritage artifact that is sacred to a contemporary community. It argues that scholars must first determine how the artifact participates in the life of its community. If this participation is integral, scholars should treat the artifact as a present-day cultural phenomenon, inseparable from its community. To explain the implications of this shift, the author turns to ethnography, which has a lengthy tradition of interacting with communities for generating research. Photographing a sacred artifact is not unlike other ethnographic research, whether tape recording stories, collecting documents, or gathering information about social practices. To guide digital work, the essay proposes ethnographic ethical principles, demonstrating their value in digitizing the 8th-century St Chad Gospels at Lichfield Cathedral, England — supporting Jamie Bianco's recent call for an \"ethical turn\" in the digital humanities.","PeriodicalId":142820,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131853159","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2014-12-06DOI: 10.1163/21659214-90000040
Stephanie Knauss
Camp is defined as a style that is characterised by excess, artificiality, theatricality, exaggeration, sentimentality. What could this possibly contribute to Christian theological aesthetics, the study of God and theological issues through the aesthetic, art, beauty? This paper proposes, through a discussion of camp in its “in carnation” in Pedro Almodovar’s cinema, that it has several aspects to offer . Camp uncovers and challenges the categories of truth and reality in theological aesthetics as well as the artforms in which this truth can be discovered. Its embrace of the super ficial and material can be seen, in theological terms, as an incarnational aesthetics that offers redemption through the affirmation of the material, not its disruption or negation. Camp underlines the subversive power of pleasure and laughter against tend encies that dismiss pleasure as escapism, and challenges theological aesthetics to acknowledge the wisdom that lies in emotions and affects. It criticizes by fostering solidarity and empathy, rather than antagonism. Thus camp represents a challenge to self-critically reflect on processes of exclusion on an aesthetic and a social level, and challenges us to imagine a different world, a world of beauty, love and passion.
{"title":"Excess, Artifice, Sentimentality: Almodóvar's Camp Cinema as a Challenge for Theological Aesthetics","authors":"Stephanie Knauss","doi":"10.1163/21659214-90000040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/21659214-90000040","url":null,"abstract":"Camp is defined as a style that is characterised by excess, artificiality, theatricality, exaggeration, sentimentality. What could this possibly contribute to Christian theological aesthetics, the study of God and theological issues through the aesthetic, art, beauty? This paper proposes, through a discussion of camp in its “in carnation” in Pedro Almodovar’s cinema, that it has several aspects to offer . Camp uncovers and challenges the categories of truth and reality in theological aesthetics as well as the artforms in which this truth can be discovered. Its embrace of the super ficial and material can be seen, in theological terms, as an incarnational aesthetics that offers redemption through the affirmation of the material, not its disruption or negation. Camp underlines the subversive power of pleasure and laughter against tend encies that dismiss pleasure as escapism, and challenges theological aesthetics to acknowledge the wisdom that lies in emotions and affects. It criticizes by fostering solidarity and empathy, rather than antagonism. Thus camp represents a challenge to self-critically reflect on processes of exclusion on an aesthetic and a social level, and challenges us to imagine a different world, a world of beauty, love and passion.","PeriodicalId":142820,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114949579","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2014-12-06DOI: 10.1163/21659214-90000039
Alina G. Birzache
My article investigates the representation and significance of the suffering female body in three films by Danish male directors operating in a religious framework: Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Axel’s Babette’s Feast (1987) and von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (1996). In these films the visual level complements the narrative level in order to accentuate the heroines’ physical suffering, often in a manner which is particularly poignant. More specifically, my analysis will point out the ways in which the body is brought into the foreground in each film and valorised against the backdrop of a confrontation between the body as pathos and the word as logos. Dreyer’s images and close-ups use the potentialities of the body to suggest the spiritual chasm between Joan of Arc and her judges. Moreover, the opposition between Joan and the theologians is also rendered in terms of the opposition between the oral and the written word, from which she is excluded. Hers is the embodied word and the passion; the subjective experience of embodied suffering becomes a test for her truth. With Babette’s Feast we move into a Lutheran pietistic background but the action is still played out in terms of Protestant–Catholic worldviews. Here the suffering of the body is toned down in a symbolic representation. Babette’s feast is actually an act of self-giving, her own body being offered to the others, symbolized by the cailles en sarcophages she prepares for the consumption of the community. Bess in Breaking the Waves challenges directly the theological foundations of the Calvinist faith of the community, opposing their veneration of the word as the letter of the Bible with an existential dedication to the embodied Word and the immediate consequences this has for human relationships. Like Joan, Bess lays bare the mechanics of power which becomes violently inscribed on her body.
{"title":"You Cannot Be in Love with a Word: Theologies of Embodiment in Dreyer's \"The Passion of Joan of Arc\", Axel's \"Babette's Feast\" and von Trier's \"Breaking the Waves\"","authors":"Alina G. Birzache","doi":"10.1163/21659214-90000039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/21659214-90000039","url":null,"abstract":"My article investigates the representation and significance of the suffering female body in three films by Danish male directors operating in a religious framework: Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Axel’s Babette’s Feast (1987) and von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (1996). In these films the visual level complements the narrative level in order to accentuate the heroines’ physical suffering, often in a manner which is particularly poignant. More specifically, my analysis will point out the ways in which the body is brought into the foreground in each film and valorised against the backdrop of a confrontation between the body as pathos and the word as logos. Dreyer’s images and close-ups use the potentialities of the body to suggest the spiritual chasm between Joan of Arc and her judges. Moreover, the opposition between Joan and the theologians is also rendered in terms of the opposition between the oral and the written word, from which she is excluded. Hers is the embodied word and the passion; the subjective experience of embodied suffering becomes a test for her truth. With Babette’s Feast we move into a Lutheran pietistic background but the action is still played out in terms of Protestant–Catholic worldviews. Here the suffering of the body is toned down in a symbolic representation. Babette’s feast is actually an act of self-giving, her own body being offered to the others, symbolized by the cailles en sarcophages she prepares for the consumption of the community. Bess in Breaking the Waves challenges directly the theological foundations of the Calvinist faith of the community, opposing their veneration of the word as the letter of the Bible with an existential dedication to the embodied Word and the immediate consequences this has for human relationships. Like Joan, Bess lays bare the mechanics of power which becomes violently inscribed on her body.","PeriodicalId":142820,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128592892","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2014-12-06DOI: 10.1163/21659214-90000064
Bob MacDonald
This article shows that automated analysis of Hebrew poetry can reveal structural aspects of the thought of an ancient poet which are clear in the aural nature of the text but are not obvious through regular reading techniques of the modern world especially in translation.
{"title":"Using Software to Analyse Patterns of Recurrence in the Poetry of the Psalms","authors":"Bob MacDonald","doi":"10.1163/21659214-90000064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/21659214-90000064","url":null,"abstract":"This article shows that automated analysis of Hebrew poetry can reveal structural aspects of the thought of an ancient poet which are clear in the aural nature of the text but are not obvious through regular reading techniques of the modern world especially in translation.","PeriodicalId":142820,"journal":{"name":"The Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture","volume":"68 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133393489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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