Religious Communication Conference

Keynote Speakers

• Professor Massimo Leone
  (Australian Endeavour Award Fellow in English, Communications and Performance Studies at Monash University, and Research Professor of Cultural Semiotics at the Department of Philosophy, University of Torino, Italy)
• Professor Lori Beaman
  (Canadian Research Chair in the Contextualisation of Religion in a Diverse Canada, and Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Classics, University of Ottawa, Canada)

Program

View the program here.

Abstracts

View the abstracts here.

Themes

The conference will focus on religious communication and religious aesthetic forms. The underlying impulse is to bring into dialogue scholarly work undertaken in religious studies and theology with debates and research in the fields of communications and cultural studies, including performance, literary, visual and aesthetic analyses. The premise of the conference is that communication and aesthetic forms play an active role in shaping a religious culture’s sensibility rather than merely reflecting that religious community’s ideology, logic or worldview. In short, religious communication makes religious experience meaningful, possible and effective.

The conference will have a wide interpretation of ‘religious communication’, including, but extending religious communication beyond ‘communication studies’ understood as ‘mass media’, to include religious modes of communication such as prayer, sermons, revelation, art, theatre and ritual, as well as religious uses of mass media. We invite papers from the perspectives across the humanities and social sciences, including literature, music, performance, film and television, anthropology, sociology and history, as well as religious studies and theology. We also invite papers from all religious perspectives.

The conference is particularly interested in exploring:

• Religious affect and its relationship to different media (e.g., song, prayer, architecture, film, performance, images in general)
• Religious interpretation and textual hermeneutics (e.g., literalism versus symbolism)
• The use of communication media and art forms by religious groups to create a sense of community
• Communication as a ‘portal’ or window to the ‘divine’ and/or the ‘sacred’
• Cross-cultural adaptation and the creolisation of religious forms
• Religion and the sacred in popular culture
• Modernity, post-modernity and religious communication.

This conference will be held immediately prior to the World Parliament of Religions, providing an opportunity for reflection on religious practice and the relationship between religious identity and the aesthetic forms of religious communication, and cross cultural communication.

Conveners

Dr Elizabeth Burns Coleman
Associate Professor Gil-Soo Han

Sponsors

School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University