School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University

Books have a rich public life beyond the printed page. This paper will consider three key fora through which book content circulates: international book fairs; screen festivals; and writers’ weeks. In particular it will investigate how these phenomena incubate the adaptation of book content into other media, and how such adaptations are then marketed back to book-centric audiences. Simone Murray is Senior Lecturer in Communications and Media Studies and Director of the Centre for the Book at Monash University. Her research focuses on the interface of the book with other communications media, particularly via digital multiformatting of content. Her book Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics (Pluto Press UK) was awarded the 2005 SHARP DeLong Book Prize for the best book on print culture published during 2004. Her current research focuses on the industrial substructures of book-to-screen adaptations of literary prize-winners, and how such research can combine book history, print culture and media studies perspectives.

The Welsh village Hay-on-Wye is usually credited with being the first book town and it has certainly directly inspired many imitators around the world over the past 40 years. This presentation will review the growth of the book town movement both internationally and in Australia, discuss the factors that seem key to success or failure, and the prospects for the future of book towns in a digital age of e-books, print-on-demand and Google Book Search. Paul McShane was awarded a Churchill Fellowship in 2002 to visit and study 15 book towns around the world. He is the Convenor of BookTown Australia and was a founder of Australia's first formal Book Town project in the NSW Southern Highlands in 1999. Paul created the BOOKtrail concept in the Southern Highlands and is assisting others in Australia and worldwide to develop similar projects to promote their bookshops and the literary heritage of their regions.

Esthetic Appreciation as a Normative Ideal

The Contemporary Historical Novel

Nineteenth-Century Climate Change

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 Has religion been replaced by art?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 three will discuss some of the enigmatic and surprising ways in which strong cultures communicate a sense of the sacred and impart meaning to existence.

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.

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.

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?’

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: What interest do women have in preaching events, and what is the nature of their engagement in them? What social aspects of religious participation in West Java can explain this? To what extent do preachers implement strategies that cater specifically for these interests in their sermons?