Religion on the Record
Tim Dean Tuesday, 1 March 2005
Claire Hoertz Badaracco, Quoting God: How Media Shape Ideas about Religion and Culture (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2005). 325 pp. $29.95.
This important volume seeks to explore how ideas and conceptions of religion and God are mediated by the media in the popular imagination. In this exploration, 25 contributors from the worlds of academia and journalism (and some with feet in both camps) till the fertile soil of interaction between religion and the media. It's a soil, however, which throws up weeds of distrust, conflict, and conspiracy. "No journalist covering religion can avoid the shibboleth that the news media are hostile to the spiritual, particularly in its organized forms. That idea coexists with an equally harsh portrayal of the entertainment media as fostering a sort of anti-morality" (Gustav Niebuhr, p. 261). Thankfully, aware of that particular shibboleth, the contributors to this book open up the full dynamism and diversity of the relationships between media and communities of faith. The collected voices of Quoting God recognize the old truth that intellectual, religious, and press freedoms are inextricably linked and vital for open democratic societies.
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