RELS 161 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Materiel, Media Create, Omnipotence

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Religious Studies
• Course: RELS 161
• Professor: Matthew Dougherty

Document Summary

Media saturation has become unprecedented in the last 20 years: 24 hour news (starting in 1990s, social media (facebook in 2004, twitter in 2008, cellular data allowing widespread internet connection. This creates a sense of global interconnectedness, and open us up to possibility and vulnerability. Right now, everyone is surrounded with endless narratives about the world around us, and we have to decipher which ones are true, which ones are too heavily bias, and which ones are nonsense. Technology has wildly reshaped the ways in which people who are religious: agriculture, technological advancements, and societal changes in turn change religion and how it is considered and practiced. Whose religions are tolerated, and how: the way religion is talked about in the media has real materiel consequences. We say this the most about "new" religions (ones that have been founded in the past 100 years)