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Religious Communication - Abstracts

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Ibrahim Abraham – ‘Thirty years of Christian punk: Style over substance?’

This paper offers a critical overview of major trends and debates relating to Christian punk music and culture over the last thirty years. Of all the forms that contemporary Christian music (CCM) has taken since its emergence in the late 1960s, Christian punk is one of the most unusual. Punk is typically regarded as thoroughly anti-religious, especially anti-Christian, whilst CCM is usually considered socially and culturally conservative, avoiding controversial musical forms and subjects in favour of simplistic spiritual messages. However, Christian punk has existed in a variety of forms since the late 1970s and today it is positively thriving. The same tensions and debates have surrounded the sub-genre for the last thirty years. The primary debate concerns authenticity. The extent to which Christian punk genuinely and organically articulates and embodies the radical values of punk is often disputed. Accordingly, there has been a great deal of scepticism and hostility directed towards Christian punk from the punk ‘mainstream’. Equally, the nature of Christian punk has often attracted criticism and censorship from the CCM industry, whilst many Christian punks refuse to engage with CCM at all. In exploring these issues, it will be argued that Christian punk is working through a dialectic comprised of the values and culture of the CCM industry and the values and culture of radical punk. Working through the contradictions of this hybridised cultural form in the context of consumer culture, this paper suggests that the tensions inherent within Christian punk reflect the broader experience of contemporary Christianity within liberal capitalism.

Biographical note: Ibrahim Abraham is a PhD student in the sociology department at the University of Bristol and an Honorary Research Associate in the Centre for the Study of Religion and Theology at Monash University. He has published articles in journals including the Australian Religion Studies Review, Contemporary Islam, Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies and Pacifica: Australasian Theological Studies as well as chapters in books including Recognition in Politics and The Blackwell Companion to the Bible and Culture. His interests include the relationship between religion, culture and politics and Marxist social analysis.

Charlotte Baines – ‘Communicating to religious voters in twenty-first century national elections’

In the twenty-first century, religious dialogue and communication strategies remain an understated yet influential factor in shaping national political elections in Australia and the United States. In the lead up to the 2004 federal election, the Australian Liberal and US Republican coalition leaders, John Howard and George Bush developed a religious agenda and political strategy to engage centre-right religious voters. This involved the government working closely with religious groups like the Evangelicals and Exclusive Brethren. From 2004 to 2007/08, the Australian Labor party and US Democrats countered the influence of the religious right in national elections, by developing a centre-left communication strategy to engage religious voters, and to win public office. This paper identifies the socio-cultural factors that led the Labor party and Democrats to view religious communication as an important political factor in the lead up to the 2007/8 national election; and the dialogue and communication strategies used to engage religious voters. These include the increased lobbying role of religious groups in the public square, the mobilization of the religious vote, and various speeches and forums targeted at specific religious groups. I conclude by summarizing the importance of religious communication in political elections and what this reveals for the representation of religious interests in Australia and the United States – two post-modern secular democracies.

Biographical note: Charlotte Baines is a Phd Candidate in the School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University. Her PhD examines the representation of religious interests under the first two years of the Rudd Labor Government. Charlotte is also a qualified lawyer and Deputy Mayor of the City of Monash. She is currently serving her second term on council.

Lori G. Beaman – ‘Religious clothing and appearance as performative statements’

Identity is a much contested concept, both in social and political theory. This paper considers some of the ways in which clothing and symbols act as markers of religious beliefs and as performative statements about identity. The subjective turn, if indeed it is a ‘turn’, emphasizes the fluid nature of identity. What is the texture of these markers and the social context of the performance that renders them either accepted or contested in broader society and in institutional contexts such as law? The paper will consider recent examples such as the media attention on the clothing of women living in polygamous colonies in the US and Canada; the debates over hijab, niqab and burqa in New Zealand, Australia, Europe and North America, and the wearing of the kirpan in Canada and the UK.

Biographical note: Lori G. Beaman holds a Canada Research Chair in the Contextualization of Religion in a Diverse Canada at the University of Ottawa. Trained in sociology, law and philosophy, she brings an interdisciplinary perspective to her central research focus which is religious freedom and its regulation. Her books include Defining Harm: Religious Freedom and the Limits of the Law, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press (2008); Religion and Canadian Society: Traditions, Transitions and Innovations, Toronto: Scholar’s Press (2006) and Religion, Globalization and Culture, edited with Peter Beyer, Leiden: Brill Academic Press (2007). She presents her work regularly at international conferences, and has published articles in numerous scholarly journals, including Nova Religio, Sociology of Religion, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and Church and State.

Thor Beowulf – ‘The silent narrative of trees in the cultural/religious landscape’

This paper will concern itself with the existential agency of trees in the cultural/religious experience. Throughout the world’s history, art and literature, the position of trees in human experience have mediated between the human and the divine. Trees, gardens and forests are conduits for, and exemplars of, the human experience in relation to the malevolent and benevolent forces of nature. They are also metaphors for the sacred and the profane in the human condition. Gardens can represent the ultimate ideal and attainment of paradise and reconciliation with the divine as in the Judeo, Christian and Islamic traditions. But a forest can also be a place of primality and confusion and a labyrinth and a place of disorientation, fear, despair and death. Certainly the early Australian artist Frederick McCubbin saw it this way in his painting of the lost child in ‘Lost’. In an increasingly urban, contemporary, secular culture, trees and forests remind us of a more fundamental deconstructed truth about existence and survival. All modern environmental movements idealise and perhaps even ‘worship’ the tree, at least symbolically. Certainly in one form or another, all the major world religions do. In fact finding a faith, culture or religion that does not have a religious or mythological narrative about trees is a serious challenge. None of this is really new but this paper overviews the overarching significance trees perform as symbols of human kind’s relation to the natural elements of the religious experience and life itself.

Biographical note: Thor Beowulf is a PhD student at the Research School of Humanities (RSH) at the Australian National University. His thesis topic examines the concept of bonsai as a trans-national and cross-cultural aesthetic phenomenon.

Rose-Marié Bezuidenhout – ‘Fractals on the rocks: San rock art and symbolic spiritual representation’

The soul’s mode of experience is in images and the symbolic process is an experience in images of images. Moreover, the symbolic elements in images aremediators between recognisable reality and the mystical, invisible realm of religion, philosophy, and magic, extending from the conscious understandable into the field of the collective unconscious and its archetypal images (Jung 1968). Archetypal images are comparable to entopic images found universally in artwork by modern children, contemporary hunter-gatherers, Palaeolithic humans, great apes and humans. Entopic (meaning inner vision) phenomena may be defined as emergent visual patterns consisting of grids, dots, spirals, zigzags, circles and curved lines. The shamanic San of the Kalahari Desert recreated similar entopic phenomena or images in their art during periods of self-induced altered states of consciousness in shamanic ceremonies and ritual. Furthermore, in their rock images, the San fused the ‘abstract’ spiritual experiences of altered states of mind with the materiality of the world in which they lived. In this paper, the correspondence between shamanic San expression of entopic images and Jung’s (1972) assertion that esoteric teaching is a typical means of expression through symbols visions, rituals and art is explored. Through the application of an archetypal and mythological semiotic textual analysis, it was found that entopic and archetypal images are manifested in and find expression in San rock art, and through their repeated symbolic expression, possibly through a process of self-similarity inherent in the nature of archetypes, become archetypal ideas and historical formula recurring in human experience.

Biographical note: Rose-Marié Bezuidenhout is Senior Lecturer, School of Arts, Communication and Media Studies, Monash South Africa.

Veronica Brady – ‘“But play you must…” The dilemma of attempting religious communication in Australia’

My title refers to Wallace Stevens’ poem ‘the Man With The Blue Guitar’, in general and to these lines in particular:

They said, ‘You have a blue guitar
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.’
And they said then, ‘But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves.

These lines seem to me to sum up the dilemma facing anyone attempting to communicate a sense of the sacred (which is how I would gloss ‘religious communication’) in a society like Australia, a settler society whose foundations lie in late the late eighteenth and then an increasingly neo-Benthamite and neo-Darwininian Britain with the kind of ambivalent attitudes to religion expressed in Stevens’ poem. The evidence suggests that religious language and religious institutions have relatively little currency but that a need for some sense of the sacred, some mysterium tremednum et fascinans and is being expressed in various ways in the arts. In this paper I would like to examine the work of film maker Paul Cox whose films seem to me to concern themselves with this mystery.

Biographical note: Veronica Brady is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of English and Cultural Studies in the University of Western Australia. She is also a Roman Catholic nun interested in the conjunction – if any – of theology, literature and society. She has published widely both in Australia and overseas and her most recent books are South of My Days, a biography of Judith Wright, and a collection of essays, The God-Shaped Hole.

John Carroll, Peter Murphy and David Tacey – ‘A conversation about culture and religion’

Human beings crave meaning. They are signifying beings. The indispensable human meanings are invested in culture. Peter Murphy will talk with John Carroll and David Tacey about the role that religion plays in contemporary culture. Is it important any more? Has religion been replaced by art? If not by art then perhaps by a sense of the sacred that is contained in the stories, artefacts, sports, and beloved places of a culture? The two will discuss some of the enigmatic and surprising ways in which strong cultures communicate a sense of the sacred and impart meaning to existence.

Biographical notes: John Carroll is Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University and author of Ego and Soul (2008), The Existential Jesus (2007), The Wreck of Western Culture (2004), and The Western Dreaming (2001). Peter Murphy is Associate Professor of Communication at Monash University, author of Civic Justice (2001), and co-author of Dialectic of Romanticism (2004) and Creativity and the Global Knowledge Economy (2009). David Tacey is Associate Professor in English and Reader in Arts at La Trobe University. His recent publications include: How to Read Jung, (2006), The Spirituality Revolution: The Emergence of Contemporary Spirituality (2003) and an edited collection (with Ann Casement) The Idea of the Numinous: Contemporary Jungian and Psychoanalytic Perspectives (2006).

Karen Crinall – ‘Iconic illusions: Mapping lines of flight through and between mother/child iconography’

The figure of a mother holding a child spans the known history of visual representation. Despite the pervasiveness of the Christian icon of the Madonna, this subject precedes and exceeds its religious usage. Pre-Christian figurines, social documentary and portrait photography, photo-journalism, welfare fund-raising campaigns, political art and graffiti are amongst the seemingly endless image-making modes and genres which employ this archetype. It is both a religious and secular icon, discursively framed in the present by Christianity’s Virgin and Christ child and by narratives of motherly love and human survival. Whatever the religious message or other intended meanings of these icons, they are ever present in our socio-cultural landscapes. This presentation explores some of the continuous and discontinuous connections between these diverse images by employing the concept of the rhizome, ‘an acentred, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 23) constituted by lines of flight, which bring into play very different regimes of signs, and even non-sign states. The rhizome is always intermezzo; a middle, in constant motion in every direction and dimension. Therefore, this presentation does not seek arrival at a conclusion; rather it represents a ‘living/growing inquiry’ into potential and possibility.

Biographical note: Karen Crinall teaches in Social and Community Welfare at Monash University, Gippsland Campus in the School of Humanities, Communications and Social Sciences. Karen’s current funded research projects include the Victorian integrated family violence service system reforms, restrictive interventions in disability services, and the collaboration between Indigenous and mainstream family violence services in East Gippsland. However, Karen is particularly passionate about the discursive connections between Madonna, or mother/child, iconography and the representation of real women. Karen’s tertiary qualifications span visual arts, education and social sciences.

Ruth Deller – ‘Representing the religious other: ‘Orientalism’ in British television discourse’

How relevant is Edward Said’s (1978/2003) notion of Orientalism to contemporary media conceptions of religion and ethnicity? By analysing representations of religious and spiritual practice in a range of programmes from major UK broadcasters, including Around The World in 80 Faiths, Undercover Mosque, Baby Bible Bashers and the BAFTA-award-winning Saving Africa’s Witch Children, this presentation explores the fetishisation of the ‘other’ in tele-visual discourse about religion and cultural identity. Looking at the language, imagery and sounds used in these programmes, it will explore how notions of authenticity and acceptability within religious/spiritual practices are communicated, and what these reveal about British religious and cultural values. When the ‘other’ is in its ‘traditional’ national context it can be perceived as exotic and desirable, yet when it threatens to challenge British values and sensibilities, it is perceived as hostile and dangerous. The potential of the spiritual to transform lives is acceptable within certain culturally ascribed boundaries, yet when it crosses those boundaries, it becomes threatening. This paper looks at how Said’s notion not only applies to discourses around Islam and the ‘Orient’ but characterises the representation of any practices, cultures and beliefs that do not embody British/Western European values of religious ‘tolerance’ and ‘moderation’ within a largely ‘secularised’ culture.

Biographical note: Ruth Deller is an associate lecturer and AHRC-funded PhD candidate at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. Her doctoral thesis is a multi-method study exploring representations of religion on factual British television 2000-2009, the intentions of those involved in producing these discourses, and the audience responses to them.

Allan Ewing – ‘Telling our story: Autobiography and the changing belief of Australians’

There is a fascination with the telling of life stories in Australian contemporary culture. Bookshops stock an extensive range of biographies and autobiographies suggesting the extent of their appeal. Television programs such as ‘Enough Rope’, ‘Talking Heads’, and ‘Australian Story’ attract a wide viewing audience. Radio interviews conducted by Margaret Throsby and Caroline Jones explore the meaning of life and have enduring appeal. This paper looks at the spiritual beliefs of Australians as they are reported or disclosed in autobiographical texts published after 1980. My particular focus is the way in which individuals telling their life stories often explain their belief and changes in that belief by referring to a specific event or perhaps even to a precise moment when their mindset moved or their attitude altered. Although my treatment of spiritual belief is limited to recent Australians autobiographies, there is a great much of significance in this sample. The brevity of the text, the tightness of the dialogue, a sharp focus of place and time, and the occasional uncompromising nature of the discussion frequently combine to provide a powerful and influential statement of belief. This paper, which draws on my continuing research, will consider the ways in which the handling of belief (existential, philosophical, spiritual and religious) in Australian autobiographies might inform and enhance prevailing accounts of popular culture and everyday life. Indeed, is it possible to assert in a period of rapid community change with new cultures and dispersed and blended family life that the telling of life stories has become an important source for the forming and re-forming of Australian community understandings?

 Biographical note: Allan Ewing is an Anglican Bishop on study leave from the Diocese of Canberra & Goulburn. He is currently a post-graduate student in the School of Theology at Charles Sturt University where he is researching the ways in which people account for their belief and faith in the telling of life stories.

Marie-Suzette Fernandes-Dias – ‘Reconciling the ‘pagan’ and the ‘sacred’: A Bakhtinian study of some Goan Catholic Traditions’

In the former bastion of the Lusitanian sea-borne empire in the Asia-Pacific, crumbling religious edifices stand sentinel amidst the wild shrubbery, to recount for posterity, the tumultuous and glorious moments of colonial history. For 450 years, these ‘lieux de mémoire’ (Nora) coupled with the traditions and beliefs that they represented, were instrumental in perpetuating the colonial ideology of cultural domination and contributed towards the crystallisation of collective memory and the forging of the Goan identity. However, despite the role of the Inquisition (1560 to 1812) in establishing strong religious in-roads and initiating major cultural upheavals in the Goan society by extirpating the pre-colonial past, ‘pagan’ traditions and heathen popular customs inevitably found their enunciation in Catholic practices and persist till this day. My paper will analyse some uniquely Goan Catholic traditions (invariably linked to the aforementioned lieux de mémoire) that incarnate a collective aspiration to reconcile the ‘pagan’ with the ‘sacred’ to achieve what Bakhtin would describe as a carnivalesque creolisation of the coloniser’s religion. I will examine how these ‘hybrid’ traditions demonstrate Bakhtin’s concept of heterroglossia and how by virtue of their ability to infuse elements of popular culture (the profane) into the burgeoning Catholic psyche, subtly challenged and triumphed over the authoritative colonial discourse.

Biographical note: Maria Suzette Fernandes-Dias is Assistant Director of the UN, International and Regional Organisations Section of the Commonwealth Department of Immigration and Citizenship. Previously she coordinated research activities at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, ANU. She holds a PhD in French (postcolonial literature) from the University of Goa, India. She has taught comparative literature, linguistics and francophone literature at the University of Goa, and has worked as the educational and cultural coordinator of Alliance Française de Goa, where she managed the AF Art Gallery. She edited Legacies of Slavery: Comparative Perspectives (2007), and was co-editor (with Elizabeth Burns Coleman) of Negotiating the Sacred II: Blasphemy and Sacrilege in the Arts (2008). Her literary awards include the Victor-Hugo Bicentenary Award (2002), Ford Foundation Campus Diversity Award (1996), OHeraldo Award for Children’s literature (1989), and the Vidya Award (1995 and 1996).

Eduardo de la Fuente – ‘Beyond the opposition between art and religion: From Max Weber to contemporary “faith and art” programs’

Max Weber famously proposed that art developed out of the religious sphere and inherited the capacity of religion to supply meaning to human existence. He also claimed that it inherited the hostility of religion to competing claims on people’s allegiances and that in modernity (i.e., capitalist commodification and bureaucratic rationalization) art would be used by people as a salvation’ from the pressures of everyday routines. This paper will argue that the relationship between art and religion has changed dramatically since. Weber penned these observations in the 1910s. Art and aesthetic symbolism are part of the material culture of contemporary churches and many churches have started relying on art to draw secular publics/audiences to their buildings. We also have art prizes, like the Blake Prize, that combine contemporary art and religious/spiritual themes. This paper will address what a contemporary Weberian reading of these new collusions of art and religion might look like and why pressures for re-enchantment’ were stronger in the modern ‘disenchanted world’ than Weber realized.

Biographical note: Eduardo de la Fuente is a Lecturer in Communications at Monash University. He has an interdisciplinary background in the fields of communication studies, sociology and social theory. He has held positions at the University of Tasmania (1998-2001) and Macquarie University (2002-7) prior to coming to Monash University, and is currently a Faculty Fellow of the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology (2005- ). With Brad West of Flinders University, he co-convenes the TASA Cultural Sociology Thematic Group. He has published in journals such as Sociological Theory, Cultural Sociology, Journal of Classical Sociology, Journal of Sociology, European Journal of Social Theory, Thesis Eleven and Distinktion: The Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory. He is currently completing a scholarly monograph for Routledge on twentieth century music and the question of cultural modernity.

Joseph Gelfer – ‘Homespun and studio-made: Aesthetic differences in the websites of Catholic and evangelical men’s ministries’

Across the western world church attendees are approximately two-thirds women. There are significant debates as to why this is, ranging from women being innately more religiously inclined, through to churches having become feminised. This is problematic for those who believe men should have an equal (or even superior) place within the life of the Church. The response to this concern is the creation of men’s ministries, which aim to provide a masculine space within the Church for existing members and to bring new men in to the Church. Previous research (Gelfer, 2009) has shown that the types of masculine performances encouraged within men’s ministries tend to diverge along denominational/orientational lines: evangelical ministries tend towards a more ‘traditional’ masculinity and Catholic ministries a ‘softer’ masculinity. This paper argues that this distinction is also apparent in the aesthetics of men’s ministries websites: that evangelical websites tend towards a highly-produced and professional product whereas Catholic websites tend to appear more homespun. This aesthetic distinction echoes broader historical differences such as leanings towards a prosperity gospel or the epistemological privilege of the poor, as well as adding further insight into the differing masculine performances.

Biographical note: Joseph Gelfer is an Adjunct Research Associate at the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University. He is founding and current editor of Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality. His book, Numen, Old Men: Masculine Spiritualities and the Problem of Patriarchy has recently been published by Equinox Publishers.

Gil-Soo Han – ‘“Foolish Jesus”: An analysis of the material Korean church in Sydney’

The prolific expansion of the Korean ethnic church in Australia and elsewhere results in part from material pursuit by the clergy and its members in the homeland since the 1970s and has been a place of comfort, religion, fellowship, conflict and other benefits. For these reasons, the Korean ethnic church has been the most significant organisation for Korean immigrants overseas. “Foolish Jesus” is a novel written by Mrs Ihm, Ae-Rin, spouse of the head minister of a Korean migrant church in Canberra, depicting the tensions between different groups of people seeking their interests. The novel is centred on the journey of a woman and her son into the sojourning life in Australia, having lost her elder son and husband, who was a school principal. The focus of the novel is her observation of a small and less than well established Korean church in Sydney. The woman identifies the newly arrived minister with her dead son in terms of their characteristics. To her observation, these two men are both caring and committed to honesty and justice. The female protagonist learns that the arrival of the minister is soon followed by a range of conspiracies pursued by a powerful member, Deacon Yi. He is the centre of the influential cancerous group and attempts to control every entitlement and movement of the minister, including a threat to lower his wage. Deacon Yi and his aids have one important reason behind their actions: recovering their downgraded status since becoming immigrants. Another dark side of the novel is a doomed love story between Angela (daughter of Deacon Yi) & Young-joon (son of the female protagonist) since Angela wants Young-joon’s heart and he needs to achieve his migrant dream in the ‘heavenly land’.

Biographical note: Gil-Soo Han is Associate Professor in Communications at Monash University. He has researched and published in the areas of religion, ethnicity, health and illness, and information, communication and technologies. His research pursuit is centred on interactions between individual members of society and diverse socio-economic institutions in the fast changing society. His publications include Health and Medicine under Capitalism: Korean Immigrants in Australia (2000), Social Sources of Church Growth: Korean Churches in the Homeland and Overseas (1994), and was co-author of Healthcare Reform and Interest Groups: The Case of Rural Australia (2000). In addition, he has published over forty journal articles and book chapters.

Kerrin Hancock – ‘Choral synagogue music: The transplantation in Melbourne by South African Jews of a distinctive liturgical music’

This paper discusses the transplantation and reception in Melbourne of the Choral Synagogue Music as performed by South African Jews. Choral Synagogue Music has been performed for more than 100 years in South Africa and is unique in the Jewish liturgical world. The emphasis of a choir in the performance of songs and cantorial music particularly at the Friday Shabbat Eve Service is inconsistent with the tradition maintained by Ashkenazi Jews especially those from Eastern Europe in particular Poland. Their preferred minhag (local liturgical music custom) and associated nusach (local prayer tunes) are interpreted and sung by a solo cantor. When the South African Jews first arrived in Melbourne they settled at Doncaster and were welcomed into the synagogue community with permission to introduce a choir for selected services. The Australian congregation who as is common in Melbourne were mostly of Polish heritage poorly received the choral music. The choir and music caused extensive disquiet and controversy. Such was the turmoil that it was never amicably resolved. Yet, after a turbulent transition of more than ten years the music is today solidly established at Central Shule (synagogue) Chabad. This boutique synagogue located in Caulfield was established in 1998 as a worship community and spiritual home for South African Jews. It has ensured the successful transplantation and acceptance of Choral Synagogue Music in Melbourne and the formation of Australia’s only Choral Synagogue in the traditional South African style.

 Biographical note: Kerrin Hancock is a respected pianist, organist and accompanist, who has for over 30 years held positions of leadership in School Music at Independent schools in Melbourne and in Geelong, South Western Victoria. In 1995 he was appointed Head of Music at the Burke Hall Campus of Xavier College a Jesuit Boarding School in Melbourne. In 2008, he accepted the post of College Organist and Senior Music Teacher across the school’s three metropolitan campuses. Kerrin is completing his PhD in Ethnomusicology within the School of Music – Conservatorium at Monash University. His article on South African Jewish Liturgical Music, with Dr Kay Dreyfus, was published in the November 2007 edition of the Victorian Historical Journal in a series of publications addressing Music, Migration and Multiculturalism.

Lorenzo Leucio Domenico Incardona – ‘Fractures in continuity: Christian literature as interpretative revolution’

My aim is to build a classification of the rules for the interpretation of Ancient Testament used in canonical gospels. This classification shall demonstrate how the Christian fracture in Judaic tradition can be seen as a matter of communication structure’s change and cultural hybridation. Judaic culture built an explicit theory of religious texts interpretation (starting, at least, with Hillel rules): how can we describe the paradoxical relationship of ‘fractured continuity’ between this theory and evangelists use of AT? The critical role of the Septuagint in canonical gospels citations; the renewing of religious literary genres; the strong social impact of ‘Christian words’ are all key-clues of the importance of a rigorous semiotic-philological point of view on these arguments. A semiotic approach to text analysis will help describe hermeneutic structures as intertextual relations. Thus, semiotics will allow us to design a map of the complex relationships between languages, texts and cultures that determined the birth of Christian literature. This map will explain the strong influence of Greek culture on Judaic-Christian forms of religious communication. Once established a typically Christian set of interpretation rules, it will be possible to verify if the set is a useful abstraction to understand the history of Christian culture. In order to do this, I’ll propose some examples from ancient Christian hermeneutic tradition (from Origen to Thomas Aquinas).

Biographical note: Lorenzo Incardona is a PhD student in Semiotics at the University of Bologna/SUM-Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane. His research project is about semiotic theory and semantic web technologies. He earned his Bachelor Degree in ‘Ancient Literary Culture’ at University of Bari, and earned a Master Degree in Semiotics with a thesis in History of Semiotics, about semiotic methods for ancient texts interpretation (the title was ‘Forms of textuality: History and texts between hermeneutics and semiotics’).

Danielle Kirby – ‘Mediated spirituality: Experience of the numinous through and in contemporary media’

Communication forms have long been acknowledged as essential to both the creation and dissemination of religion and spirituality. In recent years, however, the Internet has vastly outstripped the scope and spread of previous communication media within the western world. Interestingly, this medium has not just facilitated the promulgation of extant religious beliefs, but has also given rise to a variety of alternative spiritualities. Such spiritualities are not only dependant upon the Internet as a mode of communication with other like-minded individuals, but are also engaging with the content of various media as the focus of their spirituality. This paper seeks discuss a selection of these new spiritualities in order to demonstrate the complexities of communication within the context of digitally informed contemporary alternative spiritualities. Various Paganisms and aspects of the Otherkin Community will be viewed in order to discern not just how these communities communicate, but more particularly with what entities and through what means.

Biographical note: Danielle Kirby is a PhD Candidate at the University of Queensland, researching fiction and media as conjunct locales for new forms of metaphysical questing and spiritual understanding. She has published and lectured in the areas of online religion, new religious movements and popular culture. In addition to co-founding the Queensland Society for the Study of Religion and its attendant publications and activities, Danielle has also participated in popular forums such as the Next Wave festival 2008 (Panellist) and the Straight out of Brisbane festival 2006 (Religion Co-ordinator).Recent publications include ‘From Pulp Fiction Revealed Text: A Study of the Role of the Text in the Otherkin Community’ in Exploring Religion and the Sacred in a Media Age, edited by Deacy & Arweck (2009), and ‘Alternative Worlds: Metaphysical Questing and Virtual Community Amongst the Otherkin’ in Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on the Sacred, edited by Frances Di Lauro (2006).

Massimo Leone – ‘Communication and revelation’

The paper will reflect on the semiotic implications of the idea of revelation. What are the characteristics of meaning that is produced, communicated, and received as ‘revealed’? Are there anthropological, or even bio-logical constants in such characteristics, or do they rather vary according to socio-cultural contexts and historical époques? What terms express the idea of revelation in the different natural languages, and with which semantic connotations? What values are attributed to the idea of a revelation of meaning, and what, on the contrary, to a meaning that is non-revealed? What relations of rupture, or tension, obtain between these different valorisations? Through what narratives is the idea of a revealed meaning elaborated? How is the enunciation of this meaning configured, through what dynamics of perceptibility and imperceptibility? What are the characteristics of space, time, and actors in revelation? What figures embody the idea of revelation? What connotations are pragmatically attached to a text that encodes a revealed meaning? What consequences do these connotations bring about as regards how such text is at the origin of production, circulation, and reception of new meaning? What is the semiotic status of discourses and practices, including rites and rituals, based on the meaning of ‘revealed’ texts? Does an aesthetics of revelation exist? How do different religious cultures construe the idea of revelation? What is the role of revelation in the relation between different religious cultures, as well as in the relation between religious and non-religious cultures? How are social orders based on the idea of revelation structured (economy, politics, law, etc.). How much ‘revelation’ exists in non-religious cultures, and in religious orders based on them? The paper will try to answer at least some of these questions by drawing theoretical insights from the classics of the philosophy of revelation (Böhme, Fichte, Jacobi, Schelling, Berdjaev, Jaspers and others), from theology (Tillich, Rosenzweig, Arkoun and others), from semiotics and communication studies.

Biographical note: Massimo Leone is Endeavour Research Visiting Scholar at the School of English, Communication, and Performance Studies, Monash University, and Research Professor of Cultural Semiotics at the Department of Philosophy, University of Torino, Italy. He graduated in Communication Studies from the University of Siena, and holds a DEA in History and Semiotics of Texts and Documents from Paris VII, an MPhil in Word and Image Studies from Trinity College Dublin, a PhD in Religious Studies from the Sorbonne, a PhD in Art History from the University of Fribourg (CH). He was visiting scholar at the CNRS in Paris, at the CSIC in Madrid and Fulbright Visiting Professor at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley (USA). In 2009-2010, he will be Endeavour Research Visiting Scholar at the School of English, Performance, and Communication Studies at Monash University, Melbourne (AU). His work focuses on the role of religion in contemporary cultures. Massimo Leone has authored two books (Religious Conversion and Identity, Routledge 2004 and Saints and Signs, Walter de Gruyter 2009) and more than 100 papers in semiotics and religious studies. He has lectured in Africa, Asia, Europe and USA.

Ron S. Laura and Rachel Buchanan – ‘Setting free the Word of God’

We argue in this paper that a dualist tension exists within Christianity which limits the potential comprehensiveness of ‘religious communication’. The tension to which we allude has its theological aetiology in the disparate interpretations which have been made of the concept of Logos. On what might be called the ‘fundamentalist’ construct of Logos the written word, i.e., the Bible is the fundamental, if not the sole source of genuine communication between God and his people. The emphasis on what is written, or ‘spelt out’ we shall argue, can in its own way, serve as the casting of a spell, thereby fossilising a living language of interactive dynamic into an inert and lifeless discourse of intellect, dogma and rules. We endeavour to explain this idea in terms of what Professor Laura has elsewhere termed ‘transformative subjugation’, resulting in the technologisation of religion through its intellectualisation. Once this task has been achieved, we argue for a philosophical framework within which a better balance can be achieved between the obvious importance of the ‘Word of God’ in Christianity on the one hand, and the various modalities of its mediation by way of religious experience on the other. We argue that self-transformation and the evolution of spirituality is rarely, if ever, solely an intellectual matter. The experience of God depends upon forms of religious communication which preserve the living dynamics of what we call ‘affective resonance’, engendered by symbolic forms of interface enshrined in music, art, dance, meditation and prayer which give life and meaning to the ‘Word’.

Biographical notes: Ron Laura (D.Phil OXON) was educated at the Universities of Harvard, St John’s College Cambridge and Brasnose College Oxford where he completed his Doctoral Studies. He is currently Professor of Education at the University of Newcastle and PERC Fellow of Harvard University. He has taught and published in a range of scholarly fields including philosophy of education, medicine, public health, philosophy of culture and theology. Rachel Buchanan is a doctoral candidate in the School of Education at the University of Newcastle. She teaches in the area of Sociology of Education. Her academic interests and research includes education, feminism, theology and social justice.

David Manning – ‘Theological communication: Representations of piety in post-Reformation English media’

‘put men on such Duties as have a great shew and Appearance of Holiness. By the help of them alone may men pray and preach, and maintain spiritual Communication among them with whom they do converse’ - (John Owen, Pneumatologia, 1676)

The Reformation gave rise to a contested notion of godliness. Contemporary media not only reflected perceptions of piety (one’s duty to God) but appeared to facilitate the construction of a series of pious attributes and their binary opposites to develop a complex and malleable Protestant morality. Indeed, what is so striking about a wide range of Protestant print is the conceptual interdependency of piety and impiety and the propensity to utilize inter-related ‘thick’ concepts, rather than merely ‘thin’ notions of observance and transgression, to expound the nature and consequences of good and evil. Yet an understanding of print as a consumable artefact of communication has arguably overshadowed an appreciation of how concepts and percepts developed through media. Partly as a result, little has been done to investigate the specific cultural phenomenon of a media influenced Protestant morality. Moreover, an historical understanding of contemporary piety, which crucially encapsulated a sense of ‘vertical communication’ with God and ‘horizontal communication’ amongst believers, has yet to be fully established. This paper will investigate Protestant piety as a form of theological communication both in spiritual abstraction and via representations in oral, textual, and visual media (e.g. sermons, religious pamphlets, and broadsheets). Representations of piety will be assessed through an analysis of the manner and matter of constituent virtues such as love and selflessness. It will be argued that a construction of piety involved complex and diverse forms of theological communication which were vital to both individual and collective religious identities by godly affirmation and solidarity against impiety, which illuminate hitherto ill-understood aspects of religious culture and community.

Biographical note: David Manning completed his PhD dissertation, ‘Blasphemy in England, c. 1660-1730’, at Clare College, Cambridge in 2008, and he is now a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Chester in the UK. David’s research interests concern the cultural and religious history of early modern England. His recent and forthcoming publications include: ‘“The Devil’s Centres of Operation”: English Theatre and the Charge of Blasphemy, 1698-1708’, in Elizabeth Coleman Burns and Maria-Suzette Fernandes-Dias (eds.), Negotiating the Sacred II: Blasphemy and Sacrilege in the Arts (Canberra: Australia National University E-press, 2008), pp. 23-36; ‘Accusations of Blasphemy in English Anti-Quaker Polemic, c.1660-1701’, Quaker Studies (forthcoming, September, 2009); ‘Religious Enlightenments and Ridiculous Theologies: Representations and Applications of Ridicule in English Theological Polemic, c. 1611-1733’, in Brett C. McInelly (ed.), Religion in the Age of Enlightenment: Volume 2 (New York: AMS Press, forthcoming, 2010).

Elisha McIntyre – ‘What’s so funny about faith? Christian stand-up comedy and religious values’

Humour is one of the most powerful ways to communicate a group’s values. Our laughter betrays our thoughts and feelings and by unpacking a joke we can decode the social commentary that may be hidden (or not so hidden) inside. This paper seeks to understand the social commentary communicated through the comedy of stand-up comedians who approach their humour from a religious perspective. These comedians are all believers and use their comedy for religious as well as entertainment purposes. This paper analyses the content of several Christian stand-up routines in order to investigate the ways in which religious values are communicated, constructed, reinforced, reinterpreted and subverted through humour. Humour is a unique form of communication that by its very nature applies its own rules and logic, allowing the world to be viewed in alternative and sometimes surprising ways. It will be argued that Christian stand-up comedy is a way of making criticism more palatable, although on the whole it is conservative and serves to reinforce a sense of group exclusivity and conservative moral values.

 Biographical note: Elisha McIntyre is a doctoral student in the Department of Studies in Religion at the University of Sydney. Her research interests come under the broad umbrella of religion and popular culture with a particular emphasis on religion in the contemporary Western world. Her current research focuses on religion and humour as expressed in popular religious entertainment and material culture. She has thus far managed to inspire interest in Mormon comedy film, and hopes this trend will continue to earn a place for religious humour as a serious field of study in the discipline.

Julian Millie – ‘“Women enjoy preaching more than males”: A Bandung case study’

Since commencing his ARC-funded research into Islamic preaching in West Java, Julian Millie has been more and more struck by the greater interest of female Muslims in preaching events when compared with males. Females are highly active in organising preaching events and pedagogical events. They appear more interested in the content of the sermons, and display characteristic forms of embodied engagement in the events. Finally, successful preachers often direct their oratorical strategies specifically to female audience-members. In his paper for the Monash Religious Communication Conference, Julian Millie will present his research into these observations by answering the following questions:

Biographical note: Julian Millie is a post-doctoral fellow in the anthropology section of Monash University. Hs current research, funded by the Australian Research Council, is about Islamic oratory in contemporary West Java. He obtained his doctoral degree from Leiden University, the Netherlands. His research interests are the Islamic culture of Indonesia in general and West Java in particular, with specific attention to religious gatherings and rituals as sites for cultural production. His most recent books are Splashed by the saint: Ritual reading and Islamic sanctity in West Java (KITLV Press, 2009) and The People’s religion: The sermons of AF Ghazali (Cupumainik Press, 2008).

Michael Mullins – ‘The good story as story for good’

There is a dimension of journalism that is gripped by notions of good and evil, and most influenced by the ideals and practices of religious traditions. Its most visible practitioners may be characterised at the prophets, or high priests, of journalism. Their rituals and practices, and the way they appeal to their audiences, can be analysed to demonstrate continuity with religious traditions, and their effective displacement of, or complementarity with, these traditions. Some investigative journalists believe they have a personal vocation to use mass media to contribute towards the elimination of social ills. Others are preoccupied with a form of compelling narrative that happens to expose and dissipate evil in the community. They will suggest that their job is simply to ‘tell a good story’. Caroline Jones morphed from investigative journalist into religious story teller, while Chris Masters stops short of acknowledging the dimension of his journalism that might be seen as crusade. This paper is about investigative journalism as religious crusade. It will allude to Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner’s notion of the Anonymous Christian. The paper will analyse texts and practices of investigative journalism using key Christian theological concepts. These will include ideas of good and evil, and representation, in doctrines and rituals such as salvation and the sacraments. While the focus will be on Christian thought, the paper will point to parallel concepts in other faiths.

Biographical note: Michael Mullins is working towards an M.Phil research degree in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. His topic is cultural contact between clergy and journalists, supervised by Anne Dunn. He has been editor of Eureka Street (eurekastreet.com.au) since 2006, and was editor of CathNews (cathnews.com) between 1999 and 2006. He worked at ABC Radio between 1989 and 1997 (including a period as a producer in the Religious Department from 1989 until 1992). He has studied theology and philosophy as a member of the Jesuit order at the United Faculty of Theology within the University of Melbourne (1980-81), completed a BA (Hons) in History and English at the University of Melbourne (1982-85), and a part-time MA (Applied History) at the University of Technology Sydney (1993-97).

Angelique Nairn – ‘Finding God, losing self: Homogenised identity in church communication’

Religious communication is commonly thought of as liturgy and worship, together with those regular activities of preaching and evangelising. All these forms of what might be called ‘sacred communication’ are accepted as bringing belief and moral life into being for adherents and so contribute strongly to the formation of member identity. This research, however, contends that ‘everyday’ messages, such as announcements, lists and newsletters, blend the sacred with the profane in such a way that they are a covert but potent force of identity formation. The coded messages prevalent in the quotidian material distributed by the church subtly assist in directing the lives of church members, along particular lines and for particular purposes. The covert nature of this identity construction reflects the assertion that the ‘major power of identification derives from situations in which it goes unnoticed’ (Burke, 1972, p. 28). To analyse the formal communication distributed by the church, this research amalgamated Cheney’s (1989) identification strategies with the critical discourse analysis approach offered by Fairclough (1992). This paper reflects upon research that was not only concerned with the communication processes involved in identity construction of the church members, but also the layers of motivation contained in the activity.

Biographical note: Angelique Nairn is a doctoral student with Auckland University of Technology, where she is also a lecturer in the Bachelor of Communications specialising in the teaching of creative industries and media communication.

Edwin Ng – ‘The cybersangha and its place in contemporary Buddhist scholarship: A look at DhammaWheel.com’

In several sermons, the Buddha said that ‘admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is the whole of the holy life’. Such spiritual friendship was typically cultivated in the monastic community of the sangha. But in contemporary contexts Buddhism is developing in various de-traditionalised and secularised forms. Individuals are able to study Buddhist texts online and practice meditation independently without associating with formal Buddhist organisations and without adopting formal religious precepts. How then does a contemporary Buddhist form such admirable companionship? In this paper, I will first suggest that the online discussion forum, DhammaWheel, functions as a sangha, or more precisely, a cybersangha. As one member puts it, ‘DhammaWheel is my community of practice. I wouldn't be taking additional precepts today were it not for the support and encouragement of this community’. Secondly, I will propose that in discussing Buddhist ideas from within the context of their everyday experience, the members of DhammaWheel are ‘doing theory’ on contemporary Buddhism and are indeed producing ideas which might contribute to contemporary Buddhist thought. I do this in order to speculate on the implications of the cybersangha on contemporary Buddhist scholarship. I will suggest that to better understand how Buddhism develops in the present age, contemporary Buddhist scholars could beneficially adopt the views and methods of communication and cultural studies to engage with the cybersangha, and perhaps even develop ‘admirable camaraderie’ with Buddhists outside the academy.

Biographical note: Edwin Ng is a PhD candidate and teaches media and communications studies in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. He is researching into the wider ethico-political significance of Buddhist spirituality with poststructuralist theories of knowledge, self, and ethics.

William Peterson – ‘The Santa Nino likes to come out and play: Partying so hard it hurts at Ati-Atihan’

Just a few years shy of its 800th birthday, the Ati-Atihan Festival on the island of Panay in the centre of the Philippine archipelago pre-dates Spanish colonisation and the arrival of Christianity in the region by over 300 years. While the festival is meant to commemorate the meeting of the island’s two foundational cultures—the indigenous Ati and the Malays who came from today’s Borneo—it is the spirit of the mischievous boy-Christ that regulates its spiritual centre. Known for its Mardi-Gras atmosphere, the historical event celebrated is the partying that ensued after the Ati, the traditional inhabitants of the land, agreed to migrate from the coastal areas to the highlands after their lighter-skinned Malay cousins arrived and offered them a golden crown and an impressive necklace. In honour of the Atis’ generosity, the newcomers are believed to have smeared their faces dark with the soot from pots and cooking utensils, followed by a massive party. The Santa Nino entered the event nearly 350 years later, when the local population converted to Christianity, and since that time his power and playful energy has come to provide the spiritual foundation and healing powers needed to party so hard it hurts. Residents and visitors dance in the streets of the provincial capital of Kalibo from early morning until late at night for days on end, while on the final Sunday, effigies of highly-individuated Santa Nino statues fill the streets both as an act of veneration, but also to play with the dancers and drinkers as the event reaches a final, feverish, sacred pitch.

Biographical note: William Peterson is Head of Drama and Theatre Studies at Monash University. He has published widely on theatre, politics, and intercultural theatre practice in Singapore, the Philippines, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. His primary research focus at present is on the terrain where theatre, politics, culture and religion intersect in a range of performance activities in the Philippines, including the many performative events associated with ‘Holy Week’, the week between Palm Sunday and Easter. He has also published on Maori and New Zealand theatre and maintains an active and ongoing research interest in international festival culture. He is author of Theatre and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore (2001).

Tamara Prosic – ‘The circular dance and the spirit of orthodox Christianity’

Until the Middle Ages the so-called circular dance or chain dance was widespread throughout Europe. From the 13th century, the Catholic Church began to look unfavourably to this type of dancing and over time it slowly disappeared from the folk tradition. Today this type of dancing is most commonly found in Eastern Europe, where it is claimed by several, mostly Orthodox, nations (Greeks, Macedonians, Serbs, Bulgarians, Romanians, Moldavians, Russians, etc.) as their traditional folk dance. In contrast to their Western counterpart the Orthodox church has always looked favourably to this kind of dancing and has constantly been encouraging it by providing space and organizing classes where children, particularly in diaspora communities where the chances to ‘pick up’ the steps spontaneously are limited, can learn this type of dancing. Are the distinct attitudes of Western and Eastern Churches towards this type of dancing incidental or are they manifestations of fundamental doctrinal differences regarding their view of man and the nature of man. The paper discusses the circular dancing as the medium which conveys and preserves the particularities of the Orthodox teaching and message about the nature of man and man’s relationship to god.

Biographical note: Tamara Prosic is a lecturer with the School of Historical Studies, the Centre for Studies of Religion and Theology at Monash University. She is interested in interdisciplinary studies of religion. At the moment she is working on the significance of threshing floors as sacred spaces in ancient Mediterranean cultures, ancient rituals of cultural and personal distinction, structural dynamics of seasonal festivals and the interaction between Marxism and Orthodox Christianity. She is the author of Development and Symbolism of Passover until 70 CE. (2004) as well as chapters and articles including ‘Schizoid Coitus: Christ and the Feminine’, in Roland Boer & Jorunn Okland (eds.) Marxist Feminist Criticism of the Bible, (2008); ‘Kol Nidre: Speaking of the Unspoken (of), The Bible and Critical Theory, Vol. 3, no. 1, (2007); ‘Ritual and Myth’, in Relations, Serbian Literary Magazine, New Series, Num. 5-6, (1999 & 2000), ‘Origins of Passover’, Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament, Vol. 13. Num.1, (1999); ‘Passover in Biblical Narratives’, Journal for the Studies of the Old Testament, 82, (1999); and ‘O poreklu Pashe’, Iskustva, (1997).

Zakir Hossain Raju – ‘The wicked and the sacred in popular culture: Cinematic myth and memory in between Islam and globalisation in Post-9/11 Bangladesh’

Bangladesh, often dubbed as a moderate Islamic society, has gone through various opposing constructions of nation and identity during the mid- to late-twentieth century. In these anti-colonial and nationalist constructions Islam played a crucial role. In 1947, a resurgence of pan-Islamic brotherhood gave momentum to the construction of Pakistan state and creation of East Pakistan within it. In 1971, advocating an anti-Islam secular Bengali identity, East Pakistan moved to become independent nation called Bangladesh. In 1975, Sheikh Mujib, the ‘father of the nation’ who led the cultural-nationalist movement and liberation war against the Pakistani, pro-Islam junta, was killed. This event started a turn-around for the secular-modernist Bangladesh state towards being ‘Islamic’ state under both Zia and Ershad who optimally utilized various forms of Islamic resurgences during the 1970s-80s. So Islam has been a defining factor for (de)constructing the national and cultural identities for Bengali Muslims, the 85% population of Bangladesh. How do the cinematic media locate, record and reconstruct Islam and Islamism in such national/cultural formations, especially in post-9/11 Bangladesh? What kind of visual-cultural approaches been appropriated in order to understand and outline the modes of Islamic resurgences? These are the key questions I ask in this paper. As a way to answer these questions I focus on the filmic discourses of 2002, the year when, in the aftermath of 9/11, the world was reconfiguring the relationship between Islam and modernity. At the same period Bangladesh nation-state went through rigorous Islamicisation under the rule of Khaleda Zia who came into power in October 2001 by making a coalition with the Islamist forces including the Jama’at-e-Islami Bangladesh, the largest and most active body propagating Islamic resurgence in Bangladesh since the Pakistan days that got banned in the early 1970s because of its role against Bangladesh liberation war. I dissect two major films of 2002 in order to identify the role of cinematic processes in creating myths and memory for or against Islam in a globalizing Bangladesh. These two films: Fire and the Clay Bird represent the two cinemas of Bangladesh. Fire is one of the popular genre-based films that draw large crowds in urbanizing Bangladesh, while The Clay Bird that received a Critics’ Award in the 2002 Cannes Film Festival is an ideal example of Bangladeshi art cinema discourse: the arty, anti-establishment short and feature films that have followings among the Westernized elite in the major cities as well as among the global civil society. The two films of 2002 that I closely analyse here represent somewhat unique and oppositional characteristics in terms of constructing the myths and memories of Islam and globalization in the popular and art cinema discourses. In general, the popular films identify Islam as a positive force projecting it in everyday contexts and thus present Islam as apolitical and popular. However, Fire is somewhat ‘wicked’ film within Bangladesh popular culture. The film is mostly set in contemporary Bangkok, a place that is nothing but a city of sin in the film. Fire was rebuked as a soft porno film (it applied for ‘adults-only’ rating but was denied as there is no classification like this in Bangladesh film censor code). This film does not seem to mythologize Islam as positive and popular. Actually there is no representation of Islam as such in this film. Rather, by displaying scantily-clad women’s bodies every now and then, the film serves well as a popular but profane myth of/in a globalizing Bangladesh in a post 9/11 context. On the other hand, Bangladeshi art films normally project Islam as an orthodoxy as well as an anti-modern, anti-national force. These cultural-modernist films usually represent Islam only as resurgent Islam that is at war against the modern, national/cultural identities envisaged for all Bangladeshis. Interestingly, The Clay Bird goes against this trend. This film, by taking a rural madrasa (Islamic boarding school) as its representational microcosm and delving into the birthing pain of Bangladeshi nationhood, elaborates the multiplicity of Islam. It thus creates a powerful memory of Islamic and nationalist resurgence in 1960s East Pakistan and opposes the major tendency of Bangladeshi art cinema. In this way, underscoring the myth-making and memory-building function of popular culture, I analyse the texts of the two opposing cinematic cultures: the profane and the sacred. Contextualizing them as/within global and national cultural productions, I develop a conceptual framework to assess the different and conflicting constructions of Islam and globalization in a postcolonial Islamic society like Bangladesh.

Biographical note: Zakir Hossain Raju is Senior Lecturer of Communication and Cultural Studies at Monash University, Sunway campus, Malaysia. He obtained his PhD in Cinema Studies from La Trobe University, Melbourne in 2005. Before moving to Monash University, Malaysia, he taught at La Trobe and Monash University in Australia as well as at Independent University and University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Raju served as a Visiting Scholar at Australian National University, Canberra in 1999 and at University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur in 2007. He is the author of Bangladesh Cinema and National Identity: In Search of the Modern? (Routledge, forthcoming 2009). He has published many articles on identity, Islam and media in Asia in journals including Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAAME), Screening the Past, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Cinemaya, and in anthologies including Media Consumption and Everyday Life in Asia (Routledge, 2008), Madrasas in South Asia: Teaching Terror? (Routledge, 2008), Contemporary Asian Cinema (Berg, 2006) and Being and Becoming: The Cinemas of Asia (Macmillan, 2002).

Eric Repphun – ‘“You can’t hide from the things that you’ve done anymore”: Battlestar Galactica and the “clash of civilisations”’

This paper offers a reading of Ronald D. Moore’s ‘reboot’ of the television series Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009) as a potent, highly complex allegorical exploration of the ways in which Islam is understood and misunderstood in the West. While the series never refers directly to Islam, Muslims, or the West, by trading on the metaphoric distance offered by the genre conventions of science fiction – space travel, artificial intelligence, etc. – the series radically questions the logic of the ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis, which argues that the West and Islam are distinct entities condemned to exist in conflict. This distance, furthermore, allows Moore and his collaborators to engage in the sort of self-critical exploration of the so-called ‘War on Terror’ that remains largely forbidden – though never legally censored – in the mainstream media. In the vast fictional universe of Battlestar, neither of its warring civilisations, each of which has a distinct, fully realised religious tradition, is allowed to represent the side of civilisation or justice, at least not for very long. With its constantly shifting perspective, the series grapples with and seeks to undermine reactionary understandings of the nature of religio-political violence in the contemporary world. At the same time, it challenges conventional separations of sacred and secular. More radically, it also seriously attempts to answer the question posed in the first episode by a key character representing the Western military establishment: ‘Why are we as a people worth saving?’

Biographical note: Eric Repphun lectures on religion and film in Religious Studies at the University of Otago. With qualifications in both journalism and religious studies, his academic interests are wide-ranging and interdisciplinary in nature, centred always on the application of the theories and methods of literary interpretation in the field of religion. His research has long explored the intersections of religion and narrative popular culture in the Western context, contemporary film and literature in particular. He has done extensive work with the fiction of Canadian Douglas Coupland and the American cult novelist Chuck Palahniuk as well as on the films of Tom Tykwer and Terence Malick. His publications include ‘Look Out Through My Eyes: The Enchantments of Terrence Malick‘, Sydney Studies in Religion 9 (2009), and ‘A Polar Night of Icy Darkness? Toward a Theory of Reenchantment’, Landfall 215 (April 2008).

Johann Rossouw – ‘Communication or community? The liturgical heart of religious practice’

In this paper it will be argued that taking modern notions of communication and aesthetics as points of departure in understanding religion risks obfuscating both religion and the place of aesthetics and communication in religion. In order to avoid this risk one may start with Régis Debray’s distinction between knowledge that is transported from this time to the future time – transmission – and information that is transported from this place to another place – communication. All transmission involves some communication, but communication as such does not ensure transmission, which is central to religion. A second step to avoid the abovementioned risk may be to consider the nature and central role of liturgy in religious practice. Religious liturgy may be defined as the structuring of time and consciousness for the believer, particularly through the way religious space is set up and how the body of the believer is situated within this space. This consideration will be supplemented by examples from Soto Zen-Buddhism. A third step may be to briefly consider what has been historically at work in the modern phenomenon of separating communication and aesthetics from liturgy in religious practice. In Western modernity this can be traced back to the appearance in the twelfth century of what Ivan Illich calls the ‘bookish object’ and the nearly simultaneous adoption of clocks in European monasteries. These historical developments were fatal for the hitherto intimate bond between religious time, space and liturgy. Lastly, it may be that only by according religious liturgy its centrality in religious practice – which must not be confused with the modernist notion of religious experience – that the role of communication and aesthetics in religion is illuminated.

Biographical note: Johann Rossouw has studied philosophy, and social and political theory at the universities of Pretoria, South Africa and Lyon-3, France. He is currently researching a Ph.D. in the Politics Department, Monash University on exported modernity, in which religion in modernity and the latter’s latest phase – post-modernity – is also considered.

Claudia Terstappen – ‘Screens for projections’

In my paper I will address factors involved in transforming emotions into physicality and practices that are associated with the observance. Through personal observations evolving from my art practice a diverse range of expressions of religious beliefs, religious communication and aesthetic expressions of belief in contemporary Europe, the US, Japan and Australia are explored. People address uncertainty, fear, illness, death, grief and the desire to predict the future through objects and decorations that help to give stability in a life that is characterised by unforeseeable changes. Principles of representation, and the dimensions of these objects’ aesthetics are evaluated within their socio-historical context. Claude Levi Strauss once singled out certain things as ‘good to think with’. Objects, colours, compositions and associated rituals begin to unravel when the processes by which they come into being are scrutinized closely. This is especially so when the things in question are put into specific contexts, such as into altars and shrines – thus when they become ‘talkative’.I will discuss objects as ‘cultural actors’ and describe how objects and rituals epitomize and concentrate complex relationships into deep emotional experiences. Religious communication can be seen and experienced outside traditional settings and objects used in religious ‘installations’ are witnesses to human emotion that struggle to fit into a world that is dominated by science, technology and logic. These installations are aesthetic, autonomous and individual constructions that visualize artistic principles. Their language speaks to us about what we are and how we deal with our inner world.

Biographical note: Claudia Terstappen is Professor of Fine Arts at Monash University and a practicing artist. Her monographs include Places of worship (2005), Sacred places (2002), Geister am Jucurucu (2000), Power is only dangerous if it´s in the wrong hands (1998), Je crois aux miracles (1997), Der Versuch einen Pharao zu restaurieren (1987). Her work is included in numerous international collections including the Museum of Fine Art Houston, USA; Osaka Prefectual Government and the Collection of Seika University, Japan; Museum DKM and the Collections Grothe, Heiting, and Schneckenburger in Germany; Fundación Coca Cola, Colección Rafael Tous de Arte Contemporáneo and Spectrum Sotos, and the Museum La Coruña in Spain; and Monash University Library Collection.

Paul Emerson Teusner – ‘The spiritual cyborg: A case study of Australian Christian bloggers’

This presentation considers philosophical and sociological notions of trans-humanism as they are played out in the real-life experience of Christians online. A discursive analysis of Australian Christian bloggers, who claim a membership to, or concern with, the ‘emerging church’ movement, will form a case study to illustrate the theme. Sociologists, theologians, and cultural theorists involved in the twenty year old tradition of research into religion online have always debated about the future of Christianity, and whether the Internet will lead to a rebirth of a spirit-filled people, or to the ultimate demise of organised religion. Many now agree that online forms of religious community serve more as a complement than as a replacement to religious expression and communion in the offline world. For many Internet users, the virtual provides a space to explore new forms of religious expression that can be carried into life offline, and for them the virtual church offers a glimpse for what ‘real’ church could be like. For the same people, however, there are elements of ‘real’ church that cannot be replicated online. So they seek a harmony in their online and offline religious experiences. I propose that the use of Web 2.0 applications, such as blogs and wikis, facilitate this search for harmony, rather than promote a separation between online religion and offline religious practice. Consequently I argue that the increasing popularity of these Internet tools to express a religious identity and seek connections with others has impacts on how people participate in religious institutions in the real world. Specifically, this presentation will explore how bloggers connect online life in a highly technologised society with traditional notions of religious life and community participation.

Biographical note: Paul Emerson Teusner is a PhD student in the School of Applied Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne. The title of his dissertation is ‘Emerging church bloggers in Australia: Prophets, priests and rulers in God’s virtual world’.

Simon Theobald – ‘Faith, interfaith, and YouTube: Dialogue or derision?’

The internet, particularly web 2.0, has fundamentally changed the landscape of human communication. Internet phenomena such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube have created an instant dialogue between people at opposite ends of the globe. Homo religious has taken this opportunity as a new frontier for communication between faiths and the faithful, with countless websites offering everything from aggressive proselytising to mild-mannered interfaith dialogue. In an inverted reflection of ‘real world’ interfaith work, web 2.0, particularly YouTube, has seen the proliferation of discussion that is primarily profanity-laden, intolerant, and often hate-filled. It seeks neither consensus, nor debate, but rather only a dogged commitment to the absolute truth of the individual’s belief system, at the expense of all others. It is the argument of this essay that the anonymity of web 2.0 has created an environment in which social mores no longer apply, and free from such constraints, ‘netizens’ feel free to lambast and pontificate, without fear of any consequences. This essay will continue to argue that, rather than constituting a ‘revolution’, interfaith dialogue online is, paradoxically, better understood as a return to the contact between and behaviour of religions in the pre-modern era. The denizens of the internet adhere more to the thinking of St. Augustine, Tertullian, and William of Rubruck, than to any modern or new mode of thought.

Biographical note: Simon Theobald is a postgraduate student at the University of Sydney. His honours thesis was written on the development of community through internet activity in alternative and schismatic groups within traditional religions, with an in-depth focus on the Roman Catholic Church, Uniting Church, and Church of Scientology in Australia. His research interests include: religious activity on the internet, particularly web 2.0; religion and the state; minority-majority relations; religious legalism; religion and food.

Julie Willems – ‘‘‘Fortunatus” in concert: The juxtaposition of the sacred and secular music of the Middle Ages’

This paper is a musical and visual exploration of the intersection of the two main forms of music that have been associated with Europe in the Middle Ages: the sacred music of the church and the secular music of the court through the entertainment of the nobility and the troubadours. The two were viewed as ‘high culture’ and ‘popular culture’ respectively. The former looked to the heavens, both verbally and non-verbally, whereas the latter concerned itself with earthly themes, such as love and jealousy. Today’s exploration of the juxtaposition between the sacred and secular music of the Middle Ages is through the 1985 performances of ‘Fortunatus’, a student ensemble from Sweelink Conservatorium, Amsterdam, under the direction of Medieval Music expert, Marijke Ferguson. The performances were also influenced by the overlay of visual iconography of the time: the sacred and the secular.

Biographical note: Julie Willems holds qualifications in Arts (Communication Studies; Society, Philosophy and Politics) and in Education. She has broad research interests. Earlier research identified equity issues in computer-mediated learning. Her recently completed PhD examined the impact of learning styles in e-learning. Further research has identified sixteen equity sub-groups that affect student participation, retention and successful completion of higher education. She has also investigated issues in visual copyright. Julie was the recipient of an Australia Council grant to study medieval music and harp in Europe during 1983-1985. This paper draws on that experience.

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