Practicing Religion in the Age of the Media

by Lynn Schofield Clark (Editor), Stewart M. Hoover (Editor)

Increasingly, the religious practices people engage in and the ways they talk about what is meaningful or sacred take place in the context of media culture--in the realm of the so-called secular.

Focusing on this intersection of the sacred and the secular, this volume gathers together the work of media experts, religious historians, sociologists of religion, and authorities on American studies and art history. Topics range from Islam on the Internet to the quasi-religious practices of Elvis fans, from the uses of popular culture by the Salvation Army in its early years to the uses of interactive media technologies at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Beit Hashoah Museum of Tolerance. The issues that the essays address include the public/private divide, the distinctions between the sacred and profane, and how to distinguish between the practices that may be termed "religious" and those that may not.

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 15, 2002

About the author

Lynn Schofield Clark is Professor and Chair of the Department of Media, Film and Journalism Studies and Director of the Estlow International Center for Journalism and New Media at the University of Denver. An ethnographer who has studied and worked with diverse U.S. families and young people for more than 15 years, Clark is interested in how the everyday uses of digital, mobile and social media shape peoples’ identities and aspirations, particularly in the context of widening income inequality in the United States. She teaches courses in journalism, media and intersectionalities, and media studies. Clark is also a member of the Research Team YELL (Youth Engaged in Leadership & Learning), which is part of the University of Denver’s Bridge Project under the University’s Graduate School of Social Work.

Clark is coauthor of Young People and the Future of News: Social Media and the Rise of Connective Journalism, published by Cambridge University Press in 2017 with Associate Professor Regina Marchi of Rutgers University. The book traces the practices that are evolving as young people come to see news increasingly as something shared via social networks and social media rather than produced and circulated solely by professional news organizations. It’s been described as “original,” “insightful,” and, by National Public Radio’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro, as “a cautionary tale” for journalists and journalism.

Clark’s book The Parent App: Understanding Families in a Digital Age (Oxford University Press, 2012), was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice, and a nice summary of the book can be found in the University of Denver’s magazine. Clark’s first book, From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural (Oxford University Press, 2003/2005) explored how young people from varied (and no) religious backgrounds interpreted popular culture’s stories of the supernatural in relation to religious and spiritual understandings. It received the National Communication Association’s Best Scholarly Book Award from the Ethnography Division. She is also co-author of Media, Home, and Family (Routledge, 2004), which explored how families establish media policies and how those policies relate to family identity-construction practices. She is editor of Religion, Media, and the Marketplace ( Rutgers , 2007), and co-editor of Practicing Religion in the Age of the Media (Columbia University Press, 2002), and a co-editor (with Erika Polson and Radhika Gajjala) of a volume on media and class. Her work is also published in the Journal of Communication, the International Journal of Communication, Journalism, Communication Theory, Critical Studies in Media Communication, New Media & Society, Feminist Media Studies, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and in several other journals and edited volumes.

Clark’s research has been cited in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, Boston Globe, Hollywood Reporter, the Independent (U.K.), and in other publications; featured on CNN, NPR, BBC-Radio, and PBS; and has been presented before audiences at Harvard, Oxford, University of Copenhagen, Haifa University, RMIT (Australia), the University of North Carolina, Indiana University, the American Academy of Religion, the International Communication Association, the American Anthropological Association, the Association of Education for Journalism and Mass Communication, and in numerous other national and international venues.

She is Vice President/President Elect of the international Association of Internet Researchers and a past President of the International Society for the study of Media, Religion, and Culture. She was a Visiting Professor at the University of Copenhagen in 2009 and in 2014, Visiting Fellow at the Digital Ethnography Research Center at RMIT (Melbourne, Australia) in 2014, a 1997-98 Louisville Institute Dissertation Fellow and a 1998 nominee to the Harvard Society of Fellows. She serves on the editorial board