Religious Periodicals And Publishing In Transnational Contexts

"This volume explores the interrelationship of religion and print practices, and sheds new light on the history of religious publishing in a globalizing world and its changing media consumption. Periodicals have recently become of interest to scholars in book history and religious studies, as they try to determine how magazines, journals, newsletters, and newspapers meet the diverse spiritual demands of believers conditioned by an increasingly translocal and pluralistic religious landscape in modern America and beyond. Existing publications in this field have produced new insights into the multilayered nineteenth- and twentieth-century publishing enterprises, as well as the numerous actors behind them, often crossing ethnic, gender, and national boundaries. This volume focuses instead on the socio-economic conditions, institutional organizations, action networks, and communicative environments that shape religious publishing and its medial apparatus in transnational contexts. In doing so, the authors study the material devices, business structures, and cultural networks needed for circulating words and images that nourish specific formations of religious adherence."

This volume explores the interrelationship of religion and print practices, and sheds new light on the history of religious publishing in a globalizing world and its changing media consumption. Periodicals have recently become of interest to scholars in book history and religious studies, as they try to determine how magazines, journals, newsletters, and newspapers meet the diverse spiritual demands of believers conditioned by an increasingly translocal and pluralistic religious landscape in modern America and beyond. Existing publications in this field have produced new insights into the multilayered nineteenth- and twentieth-century publishing enterprises, as well as the numerous actors behind them, often crossing ethnic, gender, and national boundaries. This volume focuses instead on the socio-economic conditions, institutional organizations, action networks, and communicative environments that shape religious publishing and its medial apparatus in transnational contexts. In doing so, the authors study the material devices, business structures, and cultural networks needed for circulating words and images that nourish specific formations of religious adherence.

Protestant Periodicals in Transition: From the Twentieth Century to the Digital Age demarcates the field of religious periodical studies by offering a range of historical and contemporary case studies from different Protestant traditions drawn from various regions of the world. Taking religion, periodicals, and their cultures seriously, this volume focuses not only on content but on the people, processes, networks, technologies, and economics involved in periodical publishing. Case studies explore the role of the Protestant magazine in defining, policing, and extending the boundaries of religious communities, of engaging with and influencing the surrounding society through political activism and lifestyle advice, and adapting to and sometimes spearheading technological changes to keep relevant in changing times.

International specialists explore magazines and newspapers from a sociocultural perspective allowing us to understand the relation between its audience and these much beloved friends from the late seventeenth to the twenty first century. A must-read for academic and interested readers who wish to explore new and relevant ways to analyse periodicals.

The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies provides scholars and students of American Studies with theoretical and applied essays that help to define Transnational American Studies as a discipline and practice. In more than 30 essays, the volume offers a history of the concept of the "transnational" and takes readers from the Barbary frontier to Guam, from Mexico's border crossings to the intifada's contested zones. Together, the essays develop new ways for Americanists to read events, images, sound, literature, identity, film, politics, or performance transnationally through the work of diverse figures, such as Confucius, Edward Said, Pauline Hopkins, Poe, Faulkner, Michael Jackson, Onoto Watanna, and others. This timely volume also addresses presidential politics and interpictorial US history from Lincoln in Africa, to Obama and Mandela, to Trump. The essays, written by prominent global Americanists, as well as the emerging scholars shaping the field, seek to provide foundational resources as well as experimental and forward-leaning approaches to Transnational American Studies.

"This work is an innovative treatise on the evangelical magazine market during the 1970s and 1980s and how it sustained religious community and ideology. Bassimir argues that community can be produced in discourse, especially when shared rhetoric, concepts, and perspectives signal belonging. The 1970s and 1980s were a tumultuous period in United States history. In suit with a dramatic political shift to the right, evangelicalism also entered the public discourse as a distinct religious movement and was immediately besieged by cultural appropriations and internal fragmentations. This was also a time when Americans in general and evangelicals in particular grappled with issues and ideas such as feminism and legal abortion, restructuring traditional roles for women and the family. The Watergate Crisis and the newly emerging Christian Right also threw politics into turmoil. During this time, there was a surge of readership for evangelical magazines such as Christian Today, Moody Monthly, Eternity, and Post-Americans/Sojourners. While each of these magazines-and many other publications-contributes to and participates in the overall dissemination of evangelical ideology, they all also have their own outlooks and political leanings when it comes to hot-button issues. Evangelical Visions, through a thoroughly researched lens, makes important correctives to common understandings of evangelical discourse, particularly regarding the key political initiatives of the religious right. Bassimir demonstrates that within the pages of these periodicals, evangelicals hashed out a number of competing views on feminism, abortion, reproductive technologies, and political involvement itself. To accomplish this, Evangelical Visions traces the emergence of evangelical social and political awareness in the 1970s to the height of its power as a political program. The chapters in this monograph also delve into such topics as how evangelicals re-envisioned gender norms and relations in light of the feminist movement and the use of childhood as a symbol of unspoiled innocence and the pure potential of humanity. Presently, most accounts of evangelicalism cite evangelical magazines only very selectively, and virtually no studies make substantive use of those magazines as objects of investigation. Bassimir's Evangelical Visions makes a much needed contribution to our understanding of evangelicalism in the late twentieth century by providing a nuanced picture of a religious subculture that is too often reduced to caricature. This study is located at the intersection of history, religious studies, and media studies and will appeal to scholars and students of all of these fields"--

There’s religion in my marketing! There’s marketing in my religion! Selling the Sacred explores the religio-cultural and media implications of a two-sided phenomenon: marketing religion as a product and marketing products as religion. What do various forms of religion/marketing collaboration look like in the twenty-first century, and what does this tell us about American culture and society? Social and technological changes rapidly and continuously reframe religious and marketing landscapes. Crossfit is a “cult.” Televangelists use psychographics and data marketing. QAnon is a religion and big business. These are some of the examples highlighted in this collection, which engages themes related to capitalist narratives, issues related to gender and race, and the intersection of religion, politics, and marketing, among other key issues. The innovative contributors examine the phenomenon of selling the sacred, providing a better understanding of how marketing tactics, married with religious content, influence our thinking and everyday lives. These scholars bring to light how political, economic, and ideological agendas infuse the construction and presentation of the “sacred,” via more traditional religious institutions or consumer-product marketing. By examining religion and marketing broadly, this book offers engaging tools to recognize and unpack what gets sold as “sacred,” what’s at stake, and the consequences. A go-to resource for those working in marketing studies, religious studies, and media studies, Selling the Sacred is also a must-read for religious and marketing professionals.

A fascinating glimpse into the complex and often unexpected ways that women and ideas about women shaped widely read Jewish newspapers Between the 1880s and 1920s, Yiddish-language newspapers rose from obscurity to become successful institutions integral to American Jewish life. During this period, Yiddish-speaking immigrants came to view newspapers as indispensable parts of their daily lives. For many Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, acclimating to America became inextricably intertwined with becoming a devoted reader of the Yiddish periodical press, as the newspapers and their staffs became a fusion of friends, religious and political authorities, tour guides, matchmakers, and social welfare agencies. In A Revolution in Type, Ayelet Brinn argues that women were central to the emergence of the Yiddish press as a powerful, influential force in American Jewish culture. Through rhetorical debates about women readers and writers, the producers of the Yiddish press explored how to transform their newspapers to reach a large, diverse audience. The seemingly peripheral status of women’s columns and other newspaper features supposedly aimed at a female audience—but in reality, read with great interest by male and female readers alike—meant that editors and publishers often used these articles as testing grounds for the types of content their newspapers should encompass. The book explores the discovery of previously unknown work by female writers in the Yiddish press, whose contributions most often appeared without attribution; it also examines the work of men who wrote under women’s names in order to break into the press. Brinn shows that instead of framing issues of gender as marginal, we must view them as central to understanding how the American Yiddish press developed into the influential, complex, and diverse publication field it eventually became.