Daniel Stout

Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as tools to assist in spreading the gospel message throughout the world. President Spencer W. Kimball said," Technology will help spread the gospel We shall use the inventions the Lord has given us to awaken interest and acquaint ...

Page 1. BOOK REVIEW Robert Wuthnow, All in Sync: How Music and Art Are Revitalizing American Reli-gion. ... As Catherine Albanese (1996) suggests, people turn to a cultural form of religion when it is difficult to find personal expression within traditional organizations. ...

In this special issue of the Journal of Media and Religion we explore the religious experience of four seminal theorists: Jacques Ellul, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and Neil Postman. Studying the sacred dimension of a scholar’s life not only allows us to examine ideas within the rich context of personal and cultural experience but also introduces us to the method of cultural biography, which has great promise in the study of media and religion. The biographical method suggests that a theory is best understood by casting the widest of nets over the experiences of the theorist. This process is valuable in media studies, because our understanding of how religion influences the field is not as developed as it is in other disciplines where this phenomenon has a longer history of scholarship (e.g., sociology of religion, psychology of religion, cultural anthropology, and moral criticism in the humanities). In this introduction, I briefly introduce the four biographical articles and their authors. I then suggest some of the ways cultural biography might be useful in the study of media and religion. The first article, “Jacques Ellul’s Conversions and Protestant Theology,” is by Clifford G. Christians of the University of Illinois; he argues that dialectical thinking about sociology and theology is key in comprehending Ellul’s scholarship. Ellul was oneof the20thcentury’smost influentialphilosophers,andhiswritingsonthe“technological society” are salient in the literature of mass communication and cultural criticism in general. Although Ellul never reconciled Marxism and biblical thought, JOURNAL OF MEDIA AND RELIGION, 5(3), 141–146 Copyright © 2006, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

... Judith Buddenbaum's (1998) studies of religion news coverage are seminal in the field of journalism and mass communication, and her books with Daniel Stout (Stout &Buddenbaum, 1996, 2001) are some of the first empirical "audience-centered" treatments of the topic. ...

... Ensign contain articles on media use in religious contexts. Secular media literacy materials are increasingly accessible online and include government and university sources. As teachers, parents, and clergy think about media literacy, not only is more information available, but ...