Other Voices
Many individuals are probing issues related to how Communication, Digital Culture, Religion, or Theology interface. Here are some helpful excerpts…
Stewart M. Hoover is Professor of Media Studies and Professor Adjoint of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has researched and written widely on media, religion, and culture.
“The religious sphere has always been problematic for students of the media. This is evidenced by the relative paucity of works devoted to studies of relations between religion and the media. Aside from a few prominent studies of the phenomenon of televangelism (Hoover, 19888; Horsfield, 1984; Peck, 1993; Schultze, 1988), religion has been a ‘blind spot’ of media studies (Hoover, 1995; Hoover & Venturelli, 1996)
There are both obvious and somewhat obscure reasons for this situation. For most of its history, media research has been dominated by positivist-empiricist modes and methods that have embedded in them a deeply held commitment to ideas of rationalism and secularism. To put it simply, the paradigms of early media studies were in important ways inoculated against non-rationalist phenomena and non-empiricist modes of explanation. It has been convenient to leave religion out of theoretical and empirical works, thereby avoiding some troublesome issues. Most prominent among these issues is the fact that religion is difficult for media scholars for the same reasons it has always been difficult for journalists: On some levels it always defies the practices of verification so important to rational modes of inquiry in both guilds.
This situation has now begun to break open for two interrelated reasons. First, the easy and facile confinement of religion to the private sphere that has held sway in public discourse (and by extension in scholarly discourse) has been eroded by recent history. The rise of religious politics in the industrial North and the resurgence of ethnic and religious conflict elsewhere have put religion higher on the public agenda.
Second, and perhaps more important, scholarship has begun to evolve in ways that have moved questions of religion to the fore. In the field of media studies, this has resulted from the incursion of culturist scholarship into the realm of meaning and ontology (Hoover, 1995). What has been called the “unpopular popular culture” – religion – is necessarily implied by studies that look at the ontologies and rituals of everyday life. That few such studies have so far directly addressed religion is probably a temporary condition.”
From: “Media and the Construction of the Religious Public Sphere,” in Rethinking Media, Religion, and Culture, (Thousand Oaks CA: Sage Publications, 1997) 283-4.
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It has been said of Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S.J.: “(he) sought common ground in the structures and operations of human consciousness. These form not only the basis of understanding, but also the ground of communication.” (Communication and Lonergan: Common Ground for Forging the New Age.) In Method in Theology, Lonergan named communication as one of his functional specialties.
“Theology has been conceived as reflection on religion and, indeed, in the present age as a highly differentiated and specialized reflection. After research, which assembles the data thought relevant, and interpretation, which ascertains their meaning, and history, which finds meanings incarnate in deeds and movements, and dialectic, which investigates the conflicting conclusions of historians, interpreters, researchers, and foundations, which objectifies the horizon effected by intellectual, moral, and religious conversion, and doctrines, which uses foundations as a guide in selecting from the alternatives presented by dialectic, and systematics, which seeks an ultimate clarification of the meaning of doctrine, there finally comes our present concern with the eighth functional specialty, communications. [Emphasis added] It is a major concern, for it is in this final stage that theological reflection bears fruit. Without the first seven stages, of course, there is no fruit to be borne. But without the last the first seven are in vain, for they fail to mature.”
From: Method in Theology (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1971) 355.
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Robert J. Schreiter, C.PP.S., recently deceased, was a former President of the Catholic Theological Society of America and a Professor at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.
“Thanks to the new communication technologies, messages and information can now be sent around the world with near instantaneity. … the communication revolution of the second half of the twentieth century has reshaped how we perceive time and space. The communication technologies make possible a networking that increasingly eludes hierarchical control; network has replaced hierarchy as a social model for communication. (8) … ‘Flow’ is a term that has come to be used in sociology, anthropology, and communication science to denote cultural and ritual movements, a circulation of information that is patently visible yet hard to define. Flows move across geographic and other cultural boundaries, and, like a river, define a route, change the landscape, and leave behind sediment and silt that enrich the local ecology. Paul Gilroy employs the idea of a cultural flow to describe the circulation of African culture around the Atlantic basin. While African culture can be said to have begun on the African continent, forced and voluntary migration has spread that culture to Latin America, the Caribbean region, North America, and Great Britain. The flow has not been one-way…” (15)
From: The New Catholicity: Theology between the Global and the Local (Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books, 1997).
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Walter J. Ong, S.J., was University Professor emeritus of Humanities and Professor emeritus of Humanities in Psychiatry at Saint Louis University, Missouri. His work on orality and literacy and the impact of printing has been notable.
“… a significant character of present-day theology is that, like other fields of knowledge today, it is rapidly expanding and indeed exploding, and at the same time interlocking with other disciplines, such as anthropology, psychology, biology, sociology, history, and literary criticism, and with accelerating speed. Earlier theology was dominated by a world view in which knowledge was in short supply and great effort was called for to keep it from slipping away. Today we have almost innumerable devices for storing knowledge and multiplying access to it in its stored form… We live in an economy of noetic abundance, whereas earlier humans lived in one of scarcity. We live also in an intellectual world equipped to reflect on its own history as never before. Since Christian theology is more deeply embedded in history than any other theology and since it places a high value on history, in which the Son of God became flesh, the possibilities here are bright for the future.”
From: “Communications Media and the State of Theology,” in Media, Culture and Catholicism, Ed. Paul A. Soukup (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward) 20.
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Paul Philibert, O.P. served as Director of the Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame, and as a member of the Catholic Theological Society of America.
“Thirty years ago, theologians focused upon hermeneutics as a contextual determinant of theological reflection, raising issues about the loss or gain of meaning in the cultural translation of ideas and doctrines. In the interim, we have seen hermeneutical questions enter the very structure of theological discourse. At present hermeneutics is integral to the way we do theology. We are arriving at a moment in which communication theory will likewise become a shaper of our theological method.” [Emphasis added.]
From: “A Dialogue on Communication and Theology,” New Theology Review (Vol. 8, No 4, November 1995).
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John R. Sachs, S.J., served on the faculty of the Weston Jesuit School of Theology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“the mystery of God’s Trinitarian love is the mystery of God’s loving communion with the world, a divine love that makes possible and is communicated in, and through, authentic human communication. God’s ‘self’-communication brings about at the same time a finding and sharing of self that establishes true community among men and women. The church’s task for the present and future is to imagine how the new communication media can serve and promote such communication and community.”
From: “Trinity and Communications: The Mystery and Task of Self-Communication,” a paper delivered at the Catholic Theological Society of America.
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Angela Ann Zukowski, MHSH, served as director of the Institute for Pastoral Initiatives at the Center for Religious Communication at the University of Dayton, and as world President of the Association of Catholic Communicators. She initiated a Virtual Learning program for catechetics at UD – an innovative distance-learning project.
“… three theological themes recommended as an initial step (in directing our theological reflection on communication) are not exclusive theological ideas related to communication, but these themes are found in all church communication documents. … We (can) deepen our own spiritual depth and breadth for understanding communication… The theological themes are the Trinity, Jesus, and Revelation.”
From: “Forming Innovative Learning Environments Through Technology,” (Washington DC: National Catholic Educational Association).
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Lynn Andrea Stein served as an associate professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her work in artificial intelligence has convinced her that a new framework is needed for thinking about the role of computers in the world.
“As we start acknowledging the language and metaphor of interactive community – I call it ‘preaching what we practice’ – we will start solving problems in different ways… As people start to use their intuition more, I think you will see them solving problems that they thought were too difficult to solve, that people didn’t know how to talk about in a traditional framework. …don’t think of ‘computation as calculation. Think of computation as a community.”
From: “Why Your Computer is Not an Abacus: Deconstructing the Central Myth of Computer Science,” a lecture given at Harvard University.
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Cardinal Roger Mahony served as Archbishop of Los Angeles.
“… problems … should not distract us from the fact that cyberspace has the capacity to be the modern shore of the Sea of Galilee along which the Lord walks calling disciples to himself. The experience of these technologies already is of people seeking to make contact and to learn. In those parts of the world where society has become extensively depersonalized, where people look on one another as problems and even as threats – and I have to say many places in North America qualify as such places – the normal interaction and socialization of people has been interrupted. The new technologies provide an opportunity for people to come into contact once again. Alternatively, in those places which are remote from centers of culture and information – some of which are also in North America – these new technologies can create formerly unimagined opportunities to be put into contact with those who can inspire in them the quest for the Lord.”
From: “Religious Information and Evangelization in North American Data Networks,” an address before the Pontifical Council on Social Communications, March 1996.
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Franz-Josef Eilers, SVD served as professor for communication and missiology at the Divine Word Seminary in Tagaytay City, Philippines, and Communication Secretary for the Asian Bishops’ Conference. He edited a book of the basic documents of the church on Social Communication (Sta. Cruz, Manila: Logos Publications) and an Intercultural Communication text.
“When the Jesuits, for the first time in the history of their General Congregation, drafted and approved a 1995 document on social communication, they observed that ‘Communication in the society has usually been considered as a sector of apostolic activity, a field for some specialists who often felt isolated or on the margin of the apostolic body. The society needs to acknowledge that communication is not a domain restricted to a few Jesuit professionals, but a major apostolic dimension for all our apostolates…’
… one should see communication … as a theological principle. It means that the whole of Christian theology is seen and considered under the perspective of communication. Here, Communication becomes a theological principle and is not just seen as one activity which is ‘baptized’ by theology.”
From: An address given at the Conference on Religion, Media, and Culture, at the University of Edinburgh, 1999.