This book explores how media and religion combine to play a role in promoting peace and inciting violence. It analyses a wide range of media - from posters, cartoons and stained glass to websites, radio and film - and draws on diverse examples from around the world, including Iran, Rwanda and South Africa. Part One considers how various media forms can contribute to the creation of violent environments: by memorialising past hurts; by instilling fear of the ‘other’; by encouraging audiences to fight, to die or to kill neighbours for an apparently greater good. Part Two explores how film can bear witness to past acts of violence, how film-makers can reveal the search for truth, justice and reconciliation, and how new media can become sites for non-violent responses to terrorism and government oppression. To what extent can popular media arts contribute to imagining and building peace, transforming weapons into art, swords into ploughshares? Jolyon Mitchell skillfully combines personal narrative, practical insight and academic analysis.

Product Description: This Reader brings together a selection of key writings to explore the relationship between religion, media and cultures of everyday life. It provides an overview of the main debates and developments in this growing field, focusing on four major themes: Religion, spirituality and consumer culture Media and the transformation of religion The sacred senses: visual, material and audio culture Religion, and the ethics of media and culture...read more

How can audiences interact creatively, wisely and peaceably with the many different forms of violence found throughout today's media? Suicide attacks, graphic executions and the horrors of war appear in news reports, films, websites, and even on mobile phones. One approach towards media violence is to attempt to protect viewers; another is to criticise journalists, editors, film-makers and their stories. In this book Jolyon Mitchell highlights Christianity's ambiguous relationship with media violence. He goes beyond debates about the effects of watching mediated violence to examine how audiences, producers and critics interact with news images, films, video-games and advertising. He argues that practices such as hospitality, friendship, witness and worship can provide the context where both spectacular and hidden violence can be remembered and reframed. This can help audiences to imagine how their own identities and communities can be based not upon violence, but upon a more lasting foundation of peace.

Product Description: This is the first book to bring together many aspects of the interplay between religion, media and culture from around the world in a single comprehensive study. Leading international scholars provide the most up-to-date findings in their fields, and in a readable and accessible way...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)