Article
What Is Theology? Theology is a statement that tries to make sense out of our lives. Of course, there are more sophisticated views of theology. And there are many different kinds of theology: historical, systematic, practical, black, liberation — in fact, a "theology of" just about every movement and topic that requires serious thought and …
Article
Those who study television have identified three basic approaches to analyzing its cultural influence. Television can be analyzed for the meanings its transmits; for the way its programming is driven by economic considerations; and for the way it gratifies audience needs. Applying these three analyses to the TV images of the Gulf War offers some …
Book Chapter
This chapter challenges Christians to be true to the faith, and at the same time true to the canons of modern scientific inquiry.
Book Chapter
Compared to phonetic language, graphic symbolism benefits in a special way from a degree of independence: its content expresses in the three dimensions of space what phonetic language expresses in the single dimension of time. Images enjoy a dimensional freedom that writing lacks. An image can set in motion the verbal process which leads to the telling of a myth, but the image is not attached to the myth. Thus in the case of picture writing we are in the presence of "groups of figures coordinated within a system that is foreign to linear organization and thus foreign to the possibilities of continual speech."
Book Chapter
Religion on television has been around since the inception of television, just as it was with early radio. The history of the first twenty years, including Bishop Sheen. The rapid expansion from 1960 and the shift from network donated time to purchased time.
Book Chapter
The initial purpose of religious television has been to change people to a particular religious view. Some people are changed, but who? Do they already favor religion and perhaps a particular religious belief? Is their faith strengthened?
Book Chapter
Major reasons for lack of control of violence in TV are monopoly dominance by a few powerful companies, the drive for profits, the lack of accountability and a lack of the FCC to exercise oversight. This chapter suggests many ways in which better control of violence and sexual violence in the media might be initiated.
Book Chapter
The local church, its members and particularly its leaders, may view religious television as in conflict with, and damaging to, their traditional functions. Is this so? The author looks at what is revealed by the research.
Book Chapter
There is a pressing need today to understand the pressure of our culture and its distortions as well as strengths. The author gives a multitude of ideas of what can be done by the average person, by the church, by community groups to become media literate.
Book Chapter
A major concern at one time was the political influence that religious programs have in the society. Research has shown that this influence is not very large, certainly not as large as that attributed to it by the news media. Horsfield looks in particular at Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority.
Book Chapter
The auidience for paid-time religious programming reached a plateau in 1977, and has not changed significantly since. Religious television is thus not a universal model for religious faith. It is more of a specialized programming for a specialized audience.
Book Chapter
Television is a significant form of social communication. The author suggests several guidelines that should govern the church’s involvement with television.
Book Chapter
We interact with God in terms of our own culture. Many examples are given — in images, icons, art, music, hymns and others — of how we confuse our culture with the gospel.
Book Chapter
The text that encloses the truth of the Word of God is never so exact that it only bears repeating. This text invites me to retell the myth, and the recreated myth calls me to listen to the ultimate, absolute Word. The Word obliges me to speak implying that the text should never be fixed, reduced to structures, enclosed within itself, or understood as if it were an exact and precise mathematical formula. No valid semiotic diagram exists that can exhaust the text that is a metaphor for the Word of God. Such a text must be spoken rather than dissected.
Book Chapter
Four main players in the growth of religious television are examined: the FCC, the television industry, the viewing public, and the religious broadcasters, including their use of sophisticated computer technology to “answer” mail and solicit funds.
Book Chapter
In this chapter, a review of communication is outlined beginning with rudimentary forms of oral communication, to writing, to print, to wire, to wireless, to TV and the multitudes of influences upon our culture from these media.
Book Chapter
Analysis of specific television evangelists including Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, Robert Schuller, Pat Robertson and CBN, all of whom had humble beginnings. Horsfield reviews their charisma, drive, planning, and in particular their marketing techniques.
Book Chapter
The selling of etiquette books, interchangeable jobs, packaged news, and everything from automobiles to satellites are the thrust of today’s media and the result of advanced capitalism. This driving force has changed our culture and its communication modes more during the last century and a half than in any other period in cultural history.
Book Chapter
Television’s social functions. TV has exerted a strong censoring effect on the portrayal of religion. The author considers the dangers of TV’s tendencies toward over simplification, instant gratification, and sensationalism, and concludes that when religious buys into the TV culture, it runs the risk of distorting not only life, but also religious faith.
Book Chapter
The author examines the debate in the church over the growth of paid-time religious programs which has centered on several major issues, including the nature of the church, its mission, evangelism, pastoral care and counseling, and the social and political impact, and also the communication aspects: one way versus interactive communication. He concludes with some theological perspectives on the issues.
Book Chapter
The media world view and the Christian world view stand in pointed contrast: Our culture promotes consumption and waste, that our nature is to consume. The Christian world view promotes the harmony of all creation and that happiness is found in creating the reign of God within the self and among our neighbors.
Book Chapter
The media and especially television has enormous power over us. This chapter challenges us to learn how to read TV, for our illiteracy of it leads to the same consequence as print illiteracy, leaving us defenseless against its manipulation, misinformation and propaganda.
Book Chapter
The absence of factual information about religious television led to speculation and rumors which were proved false through verification. The author reviews the considerable research on religious TV.
Book Chapter
The media, especially TV, succumbs to the temptations of power causing the leaders of the electronic church to succumb to those temptations. Hence their gospel is not the gospel at all.
Book Chapter
Horsfield documents the rapid growth of paid-time religious programming during the 1960’s and 1970’s.
Book Chapter
The news media, especially TV, provides a special angle of control and vision of what we see. It is in the business for profit, not for reality, for the expansion of the businesses, corporations and monopolies that support it, not for the depth of insight needed in our complex times. Its goal is to control the thought’s and desires of listening consumers.
Book Chapter
A major of TV success has been audience size, and this is especially true among paid-time religious broadcasters. However, actual audience size has been more modest than reported by most TV evangelists.
Book Chapter
Key questions about television audiences are examined. Who watches religious television programs? Are the programs viewed by people who are otherwise nonreligious or unchurched? Why do people watch these programs?
Book Chapter
A relatively small number of corporations – mostly U.S. — control the production and distribution of communication throughout the world. Their purpose is not to help the poorer nations but to domi.em culturally and economically
Book Chapter
An analysis of hundreds of laboratory studies shows conclusively that there is a causal relationship between viewing violence on television and subsequent aggressive behavior. Fieldwork and longitudinal studies confirm the findings. We are faced with a mental pollution that is as dangerous as our physical pollution.
Book Chapter
Media represent a new form of colonialism. The United States insists on “freeflow of information” world-wide, which really means giving the fox the freedom of the chicken coop. Three guiding ethical principals are suggested, including allowing Third World nations to develop their own self-reliance in news, information, and entertainment, progressing at a rate and in a manner appropriate to their needs rather than in conformity to the marketplace needs of the industrialized nations.
Book Chapter
The Electronic Church in historical perspective: the Great Awakenings. The early stages of the Electronic Church and its rapid growth in the 1970s. An analysis and critique of the Electronic Church — its message, audience, finances and politics.
Book Chapter
The central myths of the media worldview, contrasted with the worldview of Christianity. Clearly we find ourselves living in a society which through its most powerful medium communicates a set of values, assumptions, and worldview which are completely at odds with the religious values, assumptions and worldview professed by more than 70% of its citizens.
Book Chapter
Violence and sexual violence in the media must be reduced. The important thing to stress is to attain this goal without depriving those in the media of the means of livelihood or of the rewards which are justly theirs, and without depriving citizens of their First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech. The author suggests public policy actions regarding the regulation of TV, cable, and videocassettes.
Book Chapter
There is a hidden role of television which transcends all of its surface effects. Television acts as “the cultivator of our culture.”
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How to go about “creatively transforming” the mass media. Programming strategies. Media reform strategies. Using television as “preparation for the gospel.” Media education.
Book Chapter
Extensive research shows that the electronic church has accurately diagnosed the spiritual hunger of millions of people who are reacting intuitively against the inhuman and unchristian worldview of our media culture. However, research also shows that the Electronic Church separates people from their own communities, and is not effective evangelism. Further, it has become captive to the commercial broadcasting system and its demands, and the values implicit in most of its programs are actually the values of the secular society it pretends to reject.
Book Chapter
The basic question the First Amendment raises is: To what extent are we willing to give up the value of absolute freedom of expression in order to protect society from expressions which might destroy other values in our society, or the society itself? When we face economic restraint on free speech, something like antitrust laws in communication are necessary. The author suggests three strategies for keeping the mass media open to diverse views.
Book Chapter
Communication in its most universal terms must be understood as a basic constituent of the process of being. But we also need to examine from a Christian perspective the role communication plays as a process in our experience as social and political beings. For Christians, the aim of communication is to help people interpret their existence in the light of what God has done for them as manifest in Jesus Christ.
Book Chapter
We may have underestimated the continuing influence of those traditional institutions which have managed to survive without the benefit of the mass media for many years and which continue to transfer cultural values — the family, home, community, school, church, fraternal organizations, and others. If religion alone cannot move with power and authority to bring about the changes necessary, it can at least whisper subversion and at the same time hold the vision of a free and open democracy high for those able to see it.
Book Chapter
The nature of the technological era, its new worldview and media environment, and religion’s inadequate response. The author proposes an alternative response.
Article
When it emerged in the 1980s, the Irish rock group U2, with its lead singer Bono, displayed a spiritual passion that countered the big-haired, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” synthesizer pop of that era. The band was sincere and idealistic, and its lyrics sidestepped the standard topics of sex, parties and relationships. The band consciously …
Article
The ministry of communications in Prague is located in an oppressive building that, until an uncomfortably short time ago, housed the chief bureaucrats of the Czechoslovakian Communist party. Communications minister Frantisek Hesoun moved into an office there, and during our recent meeting about the possibilities of collaborative development of new communication technologies, he handed me …
Continue reading “Communications Technologies and the Ethics of Access”
Book Chapter
The need is to stand outside the current media system, for although this system is strong and entrenched with its powerful mythology, we add to our powerlessness if we allow ourselves to remain totally under it’s influence.
Article
Preface On December 21, 1988, individuals converged on Kennedy Airport in New York City to welcome family members home for the holidays who were en route from London on Pan Am Flight 103. Later, at the airport, families learned with horror that the airplane had exploded over the tiny village of Lockerbie, in Scotland. Two …
Continue reading “Coping With Disaster: How Media Audiences Process Grief”
Article
There is no calculus for injustice, no measure for atrocity. In the Gulag Archipelago starving prisoners have been known to cut off pieces of their own flesh simply to taste a bit of red meat. Idi Amin required some of the condemned to perform sexual acts of his own devising before they were pounded to …
Continue reading “Cultivating Babel: Disinformation and Dissent in South Africa”
Article
Summary: Cyberspace is a new field for old dreams. It is the latest meeting place for both doing things together and trying to figure out, as we never cease to do, where we really are. Where the word comes from will help us to understand where we might be going with it. Norbert Wiener, …
Article
The rise of the Internet’s World Wide Web in the mid-1990s launched an unlikely hero into the media spotlight: Johann Gutenberg, the 15th-century inventor of movable printing type and technological forefather of the vernacular Bible. Reporters, Internet columnists and even some scholars began parading Gutenberg before the public as a kind of poster child for …
Article
A prima facie case can be made that there is a contradiction between the fundamental religiosity of the American public and the treatment of religion in American mass media. By all accounts, the USA is the most religious of the major western industrial countries. More Americans by far claim that religion is important in their …
Continue reading “History and Policy in American Broadcast Treatment of Religion”
Article
Exploring exactly what is meant in different situations by the concept of interaction is a high-priority task for communication scholars.(1) Everett M. Rogers, 1986 The eminent scholar Everett Rogers has commented that we are at an "epistemological turning point" in communication analysis. He adds: "Driving this epistemological revolution in communication science is the interactivity of …
Book Chapter
The Christian gospel and the mass media are much in conflict. It is our task to suggest how Christians can correlate the gospel, our culture and the media.
Book Chapter
The logical sequence of visual images and the coherence of spoken language are the starting point of this study.
Article
Book Review: Forgiven: The Rise and Fall of Jim Bakker and the PTL Ministry, by Charles E. Shepard. Atlantic Monthly Press, 635 pp., $22.95. “Jim and Tammy are a tad flamboyant.” — Jim Bakker, May 1987 [PTL is] probably the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity.” — Jerry Falwell, October 1987 “We …
Continue reading “Jim Bakker and the Eternal Revenue Service”
Article
Writer Jon Katz recently said that news coverage of the Internet lurches "from one extreme to the other." Either the Net is "a dread menace or it’s a Utopian vision." Journalism, he concluded, "has been asleep at the switches," because the Net is "not simply a story about technology, but it’s a revolutionary change in …
Article
The concern of public relations professionals, advertisers, and politicians with image and appearance as an instrument for persuading people about important matters in the real world of events and decisions is matched by the growing scholarly and intellectual interest in signs and symbols as makers, not merely conveyers, of the world we live in. …
Article
When one talks about the relationship between mass media and religion in our Australian society today, two topics generally arise. One is the lament about the number of people who no longer come to church because they’re too busy watching television or their videos, particularly during the cricket tests or popular drama series on television. …
Article
Few tasks are more important for the church today than that of shaping a theology of communication; that is, reflecting on the relation of Christian beliefs to the process which mediates contemporary life and thought. We have failed to examine our religious heritage and our sense of the holy in a systematic way, and to …
Continue reading “Mass Media’s Mythic World: At Odds with Christian Values”
Article
I want to tell a little story about the media and the president. Mostly about the media. Teddy Kennedy does not appear in this story. It begins on December 7, 1978, when a young man named Jim Fallows delivered a public lecture at Indiana University. Mr. Fallows was not then known to most of his …
Article
In the early 16th century, Martin Luther, assisted by enterprising printers unhandicapped by copyright laws, swamped the market with five pamphlets for every one put out by his Catholic opponents. Other Protestant writers poured out their own flood of sermons, treatises, polemics and devotional writings. For more than three decades Protestants dominated the recently invented …
Book
This book helps us look closely at the values of our “mediated” culture in light of the Christian Gospel.
Article
The old-time street-corner evangelist hardly ever shows up in the mass media anymore. If he does, it’s as a figure of ridicule. And that’s unfortunate, because he symbolizes both what the media most desperately try to accomplish and how they most dismally fail — especially in evangelism. When I first started working at a radio …
Article
The entertainment business is not usually thought of as a missionary enterprise, but talk-show host and media queen Oprah Winfrey is a woman on a mission. It says so right in her magazine’s table of contents: “This month’s mission The mission themes of the month in O, the Oprah magazine, are not exactly part of …
Continue reading “Oprah on a Mission: Dispensing a Gospel of Health and Happiness”
Book Chapter
The church indulges our desire to “feel good” instead of responding to our need to be spiritually challenged and fed through solid exposition of the Scriptures. The electronic church in particular panders to our appetite for entertainment rather than authentic discipleship and maturity. The following chapters make this abundantly clear. Each chapter is a gem by itself, therefore there is an entire collection of wisdom here.
Book Chapter
The author sets the stage for his examination of religious television in America. The issues involved and questions to be answered.
Article
In the New Era of Religious Communication, Pierre Babin offers a striking contrast of world-views which helps to indicate the potential which TV and other media may have to affect our religiousness. To begin with Babin introduces us to the practice among some indian tribes living in the Canadian wilderness, of plugging their children’s nostrils …
Article
Text: Whatever else one may think of them, one thing must be admitted: evangelical broadcasters have thrust the church into the electronic age. Their aggressive use of television, communication satellites, computers and mass marketing practices has created an array of effects and implications with which the church is still grappling. It would be good to …
Book
(ENTIRE BOOK) A comprehensive study of religious television. History of its early development. Who views religious TV, why they view, and how the experience affects both viewers and the local church.
Article
It has been estimated that Jesus Christ preached to no more than 20 to 30 thousand persons during his lifetime. Even if this total is underestimated, the number is trifling in contrast to the audiences reached today by his disciples who utilize the airwaves. Many ministers, perhaps scores, speak to significantly more people every time …
Book
ENTIRE BOOK An examination of the values and cultural significance of secular television, and the role of mass media in shaping our lives. The author provides a theology of communication, a critique of the Electronic Church, and concludes with practical suggestions for those who are concerned about the impact of American television worldwide.
Article
I admit to being both fascinated and repelled by my own attraction to these stories. Stories that display the presence of evil possess a strange form of "beauty" that Plato described in The Republic: Well, I said, once I heard something, and I believe it: Leontios, Aglaion’s son, so it was said, was going up …
Continue reading “The Electronic Church’s Aesthetic of Evil”
Book
(ENTIRE BOOK) We are addicted to images, a wholesale abuse of language, a dangerous addiction to surface trivia, a fixation on the unimportant, an obsession with the insignificant. Ellul’s solution is to discover a “new language.” It is the only way understanding can begin to flow again, so that we can communicate the gospel in such a way that it “penetrates.”
Article
In naming Bono Person of the Year, Time labeled him a good Samaritan. But this powerful biblical image misses the point of Bono’s significance as a celebrity leader. He goes beyond being a high-profile good Samaritan — he stretches the moral imagination of his musical audience so that they, too, see the need to reach …
Article
With the rapid march of digitization, fiber-optics and satellite distribution systems, all media are becoming electronic. Because of its early history of identification with voice and picture formats, the broadcast style of electronics, particularly television, with its concern for telling images, will enlarge its domination of all communication content, whatever the physical means of distribution. …
Continue reading “The Pseudo-Content of the Processed Image”
Article
The technologies we create and the cultures in which they are embedded are strikingly similar. The Western expansion and frontier mentality finds its expression in the constable where large caravans of families would move together to find a new home in new land. The clock which arose out of monasteries fit in perfectly with regimented …
Article
Since Alpha appeared in 2001 in Great Britain, several efforts have been made to create alternative versions of that popular evangelistic video series. Though approaches differ, the new versions are generally inspired by Alpha’s success in helping seekers to learn about the Christian faith, and in helping churches to offer a compelling overview of the …
Continue reading “Video Ventures: Two Alternatives to ‘Alpha’”
