Religion and Media

Born from anthropologists' sense of surprise at religious media phenomena, over the past two decades “religion and media” has grown into a burgeoning field of anthropological study. This entry gives an introduction to the development of this field, distinguishing two major approaches: first, a focus on the meeting of religion and media as formerly separate domains and, second, a focus on religion as itself a practice of mediation (religion as media) that evolves over time with the coming of new media. This entry discusses key topics and questions in earlier and current work on the religion–media nexus and outlines some new directions for research.