Religion and Media

Evaluation of media credibility and trust among Mormons is examined in this study. The results suggest low assessments of the credibility of the mainstream news media across several
dimensions. Participating Mormons viewed the news media as liberal and politically biased; they did not agree that the news media were credible, trustworthy, got their facts straight or were
moral.

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-love-across-the-atlantic.html


Winston Churchill famously described the political alliance between the US and UK as a ‘special relationship’, but throughout the cultural history of these two countries there have existed transatlantic ‘special relationships’ of another kind – affairs between British and American citizens who have fallen in love, with one another but often too with the idea(l) of that other place across the ocean. From romantic novelist Elinor Glyn in the 1920s to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle today, this collection examines some of the history, contemporary manifestations and enduring appeal of US-UK romance across popular culture. Looking at both historical and contemporary case-studies, drawn from across film, television, music, literature, news and politics, this is a timely intervention into the popular romantic discourse of US-UK relations, at a critical and transitional moment in the ongoing viability of the special relationship.

Popular culture is a term that usually refers to those commercially-produced items specifically associated with leisure, media, and lifestyle choices. To study religions in popular culture, then, is to explore religion's appearance in the commercially-produced artifacts and texts of a culture. The study of popular culture has been a catalyst of sorts in the context of studying religion. Some have speculated that with the increasing presence of religion in commercially-produced products and specifically in the entertainment media, religion may be reduced to mere forms of entertainment. Others, however, have argued that religion has always been expressed and experienced through contemporary forms of culture, and thus its manifestation in popular culture can be interpreted as a sign of the vitality, rather than the demise or superficiality, of contemporary religions. Popular culture is worthy of study given its role in cultural reproduction. The study of popular culture and religion encourages us to consider the extent to which popular cultural representations limit broader critical considerations of religion by depicting and reinforcing taken-for-granted assumptions of what religion is, who practices it and where, and how it endures as a powerful societal institution. Alternately, popular culture has been explored as a site for public imaginings of how religious practices and identities might be different and more inclusive than they have been in the past, pointing toward the artistic and playful ways in which popular religious expression can comment upon dominant religion, dominant culture, and the power relations between them. With the rise of a ubiquitous media culture in which people are increasingly creators and distributors as well as consumers and modifiers of popular culture, popular culture has come to encompass a wide variety of products and artifacts, including those both commercially produced and those that are generated outside of both traditional commercial and religious contexts. Studies might include explorations of religion in such popular television programs as Orange is the New Black or in novels such as The Secret Life of Bees, but might also include considerations of how religion and popular culture intersect in practices of Buddhism in the virtual gaming site Second Life, in the critical expressions of Chicana art, in the commercial experiments of Islamic punk rock groups, and in hashtag justice movements.