Week 2 theoretical- Religious Sensations in Mainstream Media, Theoretical-Week 2

Religious Sensations in Mainstream Media, Theoretical-Week 2

After reading this weeks theoretical article, a few things resonated with me. Meyer talks about sacred images or representations such as the Christian cross, Hindu deities or sacred drums. Although these images may at first seem a mere tool in the larger scheme of the religious show that is put on, they are sensational forms (Meyer 2012). These aesthetic sensational forms not only exemplify the large void between humans and the Divine, but 'bridge that distance and make it possible to experience...the transcendental' (Meyer 2012, p.162). The deity, sacred drum or cross is no longer profane but sacralised by the ritual or context in which it appears. Eliade posit this beautifully when he said, 'The sacred tree, the sacred stone are not adorned as stone or tree; they are worshipped precisely because they are hierophanies, because they show something that is no longer stone or tree but the sacred, the ganz andere' (Eliade 1957, p.12).

Whether it be a beautifully ornate statue, a televised sermon or singing bowl chanting, 'the phenomenological reality of religious experience...[is]... grounded in bodily sensations' (Meyer 2012, p.164). What Meyer is trying to emphasize here is that the ecstatic experience is not attributed to one single factor, it is the sum of all sensations, the beautiful music playing as one enters the holy place, the holy imagery that its decorated with and also the participation in song or chanting that grabs the spectator and turns him or her into a participator. Meyer discusses how media in the current age now plays a role in inducing sensational transcendence (Meyer, 2012).

Today's media has shaken hands in renewed friendship with religion. With new technologies, has come new ways of promoting and reaching out through religion. Meyer claims that with these new technologies the relationship between media and religion has opened up in new ways, such as audiovisual religiosity used as empirical evidence for faith based truths (Meyer 2012).  As humans rely on what is visible to prove authenticity, some people's 'belief becomes thus vested in the image, it becomes hard to distinguish between belief and make-believe, miracles and special effects, or truth and illusion' (Meyer 2012, p.164). In addition paradoxes arrive with religion and modern media's new friendship, paradoxes of ethics. Partridge discussed the release of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ and how although there was extreme violence in the film, there were Christian letters written to the board of movie rating classification arguing the age should be lowered from 18 to 15 because of the 'importance of the film's religious content' (Partridge 2001, p.496). For a faith that renounces violence, the paradox of enforcing a religious yet violent film is evident.


Multimedia
http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=download&id=1359386

References
Eliade, M 1957, The Sacred and the Profane: The nature of Religion, Harcourt Inc, Orlando.

Meyer, B 2012, 'Religious Sensations: Media, aesthetics, and the study of contemporary religion', in Religion, Media and Culture: A Reader, Routledge, London and New York, pp.159-169.

Partridge, C 2001, 'Religion and Popular Culture', in Religions in the Modern World; Traditions and Transformations, Routledge, London and New York, pp.489-521.