School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University

The prolific expansion of the Korean ethnic church in Australia and elsewhere results in part from material pursuit by the clergy and its members in the homeland since the 1970s and has been a place of comfort, religion, fellowship, conflict and other benefits. For these reasons, the Korean ethnic church has been the most significant organisation for Korean immigrants overseas. “Foolish Jesus” is a novel written by Mrs Ihm, Ae-Rin, spouse of the head minister of a Korean migrant church in Canberra, depicting the tensions between different groups of people seeking their interests. The novel is centred on the journey of a woman and her son into the sojourning life in Australia, having lost her elder son and husband, who was a school principal. The focus of the novel is her observation of a small and less than well established Korean church in Sydney. The woman identifies the newly arrived minister with her dead son in terms of their characteristics. To her observation, these two men are both caring and committed to honesty and justice. The female protagonist learns that the arrival of the minister is soon followed by a range of conspiracies pursued by a powerful member, Deacon Yi. He is the centre of the influential cancerous group and attempts to control every entitlement and movement of the minister, including a threat to lower his wage. Deacon Yi and his aids have one important reason behind their actions: recovering their downgraded status since becoming immigrants. Another dark side of the novel is a doomed love story between Angela (daughter of Deacon Yi) & Young-joon (son of the female protagonist) since Angela wants Young- joon’s heart and he needs to achieve his migrant dream in the ‘heavenly land’.

The paper will reflect on the semiotic implications of the idea of revelation. What are the characteristics of meaning that is produced, communicated, and received as ‘revealed’? Are there anthropological, or even bio-logical constants in such characteristics, or do they rather vary according to socio-cultural contexts and historical époques? What terms express the idea of revelation in the different natural languages, and with which semantic connotations? What values are attributed to the idea of a revelation of meaning, and what, on the contrary, to a meaning that is non-revealed? What relations of rupture, or tension, obtain between these different valorisations? Through what narratives is the idea of a revealed meaning elaborated? How is the enunciation of this meaning configured, through what dynamics of perceptibility and imperceptibility? What are the characteristics of space, time, and actors in revelation? What figures embody the idea of revelation? What connotations are pragmatically attached to a text that encodes a revealed meaning? What consequences do these connotations bring about as regards how such text is at the origin of production, circulation, and reception of new meaning? What is the semiotic status of discourses and practices, including rites and rituals, based on the meaning of ‘revealed’ texts? Does an aesthetics of revelation exist? How do different religious cultures construe the idea of revelation? What is the role of revelation in the relation between different religious cultures, as well as in the relation between religious and non-religious cultures? How are social orders based on the idea of revelation structured (economy, politics, law, etc.). How much ‘revelation’ exists in non-religious cultures, and in religious orders based on them? The paper will try to answer at least some of these questions by drawing theoretical insights from the classics of the philosophy of revelation (Böhme, Fichte, Jacobi, Schelling, Berdjaev, Jaspers and others), from theology (Tillich, Rosenzweig, Arkoun and others), from semiotics and communication studies.

We argue in this paper that a dualist tension exists within Christianity which limits the potential comprehensiveness of ‘religious communication’. The tension to which we allude has its theological aetiology in the disparate interpretations which have been made of the concept of Logos. On what might be called the ‘fundamentalist’ construct of Logos the written word, i.e., the Bible is the fundamental, if not the sole source of genuine communication between God and his people. The emphasis on what is written, or ‘spelt out’ we shall argue, can in its own way, serve as the casting of a spell, thereby fossilising a living language of interactive dynamic into an inert and lifeless discourse of intellect, dogma and rules. We endeavour to explain this idea in terms of what Professor Laura has elsewhere termed ‘transformative subjugation’, resulting in the technologisation of religion through its intellectualisation. Once this task has been achieved, we argue for a philosophical framework within which a better balance can be achieved between the obvious importance of the ‘Word of God’ in Christianity on the one hand, and the various modalities of its mediation by way of religious experience on the other. We argue that self-transformation and the evolution of spirituality is rarely, if ever, solely an intellectual matter. The experience of God depends upon forms of religious communication which preserve the living dynamics of what we call ‘affective resonance’, engendered by symbolic forms of interface enshrined in music, art, dance, meditation and prayer which give life and meaning to the ‘Word’.

There is a dimension of journalism that is gripped by notions of good and evil, and most influenced by the ideals and practices of religious traditions. Its most visible practitioners may be characterised at the prophets, or high priests, of journalism. Their rituals and practices, and the way they appeal to their audiences, can be analysed to demonstrate continuity with religious traditions, and their effective displacement of, or complementarity with, these traditions. Some investigative journalists believe they have a personal vocation to use mass media to contribute towards the elimination of social ills. Others are preoccupied with a form of compelling narrative that happens to expose and dissipate evil in the community. They will suggest that their job is simply to ‘tell a good story’. Caroline Jones morphed from investigative journalist into religious story teller, while Chris Masters stops short of acknowledging the dimension of his journalism that might be seen as crusade. This paper is about investigative journalism as religious crusade. It will allude to Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner’s notion of the Anonymous Christian. The paper will analyse texts and practices of investigative journalism using key Christian theological concepts. These will include ideas of good and evil, and representation, in doctrines and rituals such as salvation and the sacraments. While the focus will be on Christian thought, the paper will point to parallel concepts in other faiths.

My title refers to Wallace Stevens’ poem ‘the Man With The Blue Guitar’, in general and to these lines in particular: They said, ‘You have a blue guitar You do not play things as they are.’ The man replied, ‘Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar.’ And they said then, ‘But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves. These lines seem to me to sum up the dilemma facing anyone attempting to communicate a sense of the sacred (which is how I would gloss ‘religious communication’) in a society like Australia, a settler society whose foundations lie in late the late eighteenth and then an increasingly neo-Benthamite and neo-Darwininian Britain with the kind of ambivalent attitudes to religion expressed in Stevens’ poem. The evidence suggests that religious language and religious institutions have relatively little currency but that a need for some sense of the sacred, some mysterium tremednum et fascinans and is being expressed in various ways in the arts. In this paper I would like to examine the work of film maker Paul Cox whose films seem to me to concern themselves with this mystery.

‘…put men on such Duties as have a great shew and Appearance of Holiness. By the help of them alone may men pray and preach, and maintain spiritual Communication among them with whom they do converse’ (John Owen, Pneumatologia, 1676) The Reformation gave rise to a contested notion of godliness. Contemporary media not only reflected perceptions of piety (one’s duty to God) but appeared to facilitate the construction of a series of pious attributes and their binary opposites to develop a complex and malleable Protestant morality. Indeed, what is so striking about a wide range of Protestant print is the conceptual interdependency of piety and impiety and the propensity to utilize inter-related ‘thick’ concepts, rather than merely ‘thin’ notions of observance and transgression, to expound the nature and consequences of good and evil. Yet an understanding of print as a consumable artefact of communication has arguably overshadowed an appreciation of how concepts and percepts developed through media. Partly as a result, little has been done to investigate the specific cultural phenomenon of a media influenced Protestant morality. Moreover, an historical understanding of contemporary piety, which crucially encapsulated a sense of ‘vertical communication’ with God and ‘horizontal communication’ amongst believers, has yet to be fully established. This paper will investigate Protestant piety as a form of theological communication both in spiritual abstraction and via representations in oral, textual, and visual media (e.g. sermons, religious pamphlets, and broadsheets). Representations of piety will be assessed through an analysis of the manner and matter of constituent virtues such as love and selflessness. It will be argued that a construction of piety involved complex and diverse forms of theological communication which were vital to both individual and collective religious identities by godly affirmation and solidarity against impiety, which illuminate hitherto ill-understood aspects of religious culture and community.

Bangladesh, often dubbed as a moderate Islamic society, has gone through various opposing constructions of nation and identity during the mid- to late-twentieth century. In these anti-colonial and nationalist constructions Islam played a crucial role. In 1947, a resurgence of pan-Islamic brotherhood gave momentum to the construction of Pakistan state and creation of East Pakistan within it. In 1971, advocating an anti-Islam secular Bengali identity, East Pakistan moved to become independent nation called Bangladesh. In 1975, Sheikh Mujib, the ‘father of the nation’ who led the cultural-nationalist movement and liberation war against the Pakistani, pro-Islam junta, was killed. This event started a turn-around for the secular-modernist Bangladesh state towards being ‘Islamic’ state under both Zia and Ershad who optimally utilized various forms of Islamic resurgences during the 1970s-80s. So Islam has been a defining factor for (de)constructing the national and cultural identities for Bengali Muslims, the 85% population of Bangladesh. How do the cinematic media locate, record and reconstruct Islam and Islamism in such national/cultural formations, especially in post-9/11 Bangladesh? What kind of visual-cultural approaches been appropriated in order to understand and outline the modes of Islamic resurgences? These are the key questions I ask in this paper. As a way to answer these questions I focus on the filmic discourses of 2002, the year when, in the aftermath of 9/11, the world was reconfiguring the relationship between Islam and modernity. At the same period Bangladesh nation-state went through rigorous Islamicisation under the rule of Khaleda Zia who came into power in October 2001 by making a coalition with the Islamist forces including the Jama’at-e-Islami Bangladesh, the largest and most active body propagating Islamic resurgence in Bangladesh since the Pakistan days that got banned in the early 1970s because of its role against Bangladesh liberation war. I dissect two major films of 2002 in order to identify the role of cinematic processes in creating myths and memory for or against Islam in a globalizing Bangladesh. These two films: Fire and the Clay Bird represent the two cinemas of Bangladesh. Fire is one of the popular genre-based films that draw large crowds in urbanizing Bangladesh, while The Clay Bird that received a Critics’ Award in the 2002 Cannes Film Festival is an ideal example of Bangladeshi art cinema discourse: the arty, anti-establishment short and feature films that have followings among the Westernized elite in the major cities as well as among the global civil society.

My aim is to build a classification of the rules for the interpretation of Ancient Testament used in canonical gospels. This classification shall demonstrate how the Christian fracture in Judaic tradition can be seen as a matter of communication structure’s change and cultural hybridation. Judaic culture built an explicit theory of religious texts interpretation (starting, at least, with Hillel rules): how can we describe the paradoxical relationship of ‘fractured continuity’ between this theory and evangelists use of AT? The critical role of the Septuagint in canonical gospels citations; the renewing of religious literary genres; the strong social impact of ‘Christian words’ are all key-clues of the importance of a rigorous semiotic-philological point of view on these arguments. A semiotic approach to text analysis will help describe hermeneutic structures as intertextual relations. Thus, semiotics will allow us to design a map of the complex relationships between languages, texts and cultures that determined the birth of Christian literature. This map will explain the strong influence of Greek culture on Judaic-Christian forms of religious communication. Once established a typically Christian set of interpretation rules, it will be possible to verify if the set is a useful abstraction to understand the history of Christian culture. In order to do this, I’ll propose some examples from ancient Christian hermeneutic tradition (from Origen to Thomas Aquinas).

Just a few years shy of its 800th birthday, the Ati-Atihan Festival on the island of Panay in the centre of the Philippine archipelago pre-dates Spanish colonisation and the arrival of Christianity in the region by over 300 years. While the festival is meant to commemorate the meeting of the island’s two foundational cultures—the indigenous Ati and the Malays who came from today’s Borneo—it is the spirit of the mischievous boy-Christ that regulates its spiritual centre. Known for its Mardi-Gras atmosphere, the historical event celebrated is the partying that ensued after the Ati, the traditional inhabitants of the land, agreed to migrate from the coastal areas to the highlands after their lighter- skinned Malay cousins arrived and offered them a golden crown and an impressive necklace. In honour of the Atis’ generosity, the newcomers are believed to have smeared their faces dark with the soot from pots and cooking utensils, followed by a massive party. The Santa Nino entered the event nearly 350 years later, when the local population converted to Christianity, and since that time his power and playful energy has come to provide the spiritual foundation and healing powers needed to party so hard it hurts. Residents and visitors dance in the streets of the provincial capital of Kalibo from early morning until late at night for days on end, while on the final Sunday, effigies of highly-individuated Santa Nino statues fill the streets both as an act of veneration, but also to play with the dancers and drinkers as the event reaches a final, feverish, sacred pitch.

In my paper I will address factors involved in transforming emotions into physicality and practices that are associated with the observance. Through personal observations evolving from my art practice a diverse range of expressions of religious beliefs, religious communication and aesthetic expressions of belief in contemporary Europe, the US, Japan and Australia are explored. People address uncertainty, fear, illness, death, grief and the desire to predict the future through objects and decorations that help to give stability in a life that is characterised by unforeseeable changes. Principles of representation, and the dimensions of these objects’ aesthetics are evaluated within their socio-historical context. Claude Levi Strauss once singled out certain things as ‘good to think with’. Objects, colours, compositions and associated rituals begin to unravel when the processes by which they come into being are scrutinized closely. This is especially so when the things in question are put into specific contexts, such as into altars and shrines – thus when they become ‘talkative’. I will discuss objects as ‘cultural actors’ and describe how objects and rituals epitomize and concentrate complex relationships into deep emotional experiences. Religious communication can be seen and experienced outside traditional settings and objects used in religious ‘installations’ are witnesses to human emotion that struggle to fit into a world that is dominated by science, technology and logic. These installations are aesthetic, autonomous and individual constructions that visualize artistic principles. Their language speaks to us about what we are and how we deal with our inner world.

This presentation considers philosophical and sociological notions of trans-humanism as they are played out in the real-life experience of Christians online. A discursive analysis of Australian Christian bloggers, who claim a membership to, or concern with, the ‘emerging church’ movement, will form a case study to illustrate the theme. Sociologists, theologians, and cultural theorists involved in the twenty year old tradition of research into religion online have always debated about the future of Christianity, and whether the Internet will lead to a rebirth of a spirit-filled people, or to the ultimate demise of organised religion. Many now agree that online forms of religious community serve more as a complement than as a replacement to religious expression and communion in the offline world. For many Internet users, the virtual provides a space to explore new forms of religious expression that can be carried into life offline, and for them the virtual church offers a glimpse for what ‘real’ church could be like. For the same people, however, there are elements of ‘real’ church that cannot be replicated online. So they seek a harmony in their online and offline religious experiences. I propose that the use of Web 2.0 applications, such as blogs and wikis, facilitate this search for harmony, rather than promote a separation between online religion and offline religious practice. Consequently I argue that the increasing popularity of these Internet tools to express a religious identity and seek connections with others has impacts on how people participate in religious institutions in the real world. Specifically, this presentation will explore how bloggers connect online life in a highly technologised society with traditional notions of religious life and community participation.

Communication forms have long been acknowledged as essential to both the creation and dissemination of religion and spirituality. In recent years, however, the Internet has vastly outstripped the scope and spread of previous communication media within the western world. Interestingly, this medium has not just facilitated the promulgation of extant religious beliefs, but has also given rise to a variety of alternative spiritualities. Such spiritualities are not only dependant upon the Internet as a mode of communication with other like-minded individuals, but are also engaging with the content of various media as the focus of their spirituality. This paper seeks discuss a selection of these new spiritualities in order to demonstrate the complexities of communication within the context of digitally informed contemporary alternative spiritualities. Various Paganisms and aspects of the Otherkin Community will be viewed in order to discern not just how these communities communicate, but more particularly with what entities and through what means.

Religious communication is commonly thought of as liturgy and worship, together with those regular activities of preaching and evangelising. All these forms of what might be called ‘sacred communication’ are accepted as bringing belief and moral life into being for adherents and so contribute strongly to the formation of member identity. This research, however, contends that ‘everyday’ messages, such as announcements, lists and newsletters, blend the sacred with the profane in such a way that they are a covert but potent force of identity formation. The coded messages prevalent in the quotidian material distributed by the church subtly assist in directing the lives of church members, along particular lines and for particular purposes. The covert nature of this identity construction reflects the assertion that the ‘major power of identification derives from situations in which it goes unnoticed’ (Burke, 1972, p. 28). To analyse the formal communication distributed by the church, this research amalgamated Cheney’s (1989) identification strategies with the critical discourse analysis approach offered by Fairclough (1992). This paper reflects upon research that was not only concerned with the communication processes involved in identity construction of the church members, but also the layers of motivation contained in the activity.

In this paper it will be argued that taking modern notions of communication and aesthetics as points of departure in understanding religion risks obfuscating both religion and the place of aesthetics and communication in religion. In order to avoid this risk one may start with Régis Debray’s distinction between knowledge that is transported from this time to the future time – transmission – and information that is transported from this place to another place – communication. All transmission involves some communication, but communication as such does not ensure transmission, which is central to religion. A second step to avoid the abovementioned risk may be to consider the nature and central role of liturgy in religious practice. Religious liturgy may be defined as the structuring of time and consciousness for the believer, particularly through the way religious space is set up and how the body of the believer is situated within this space. This consideration will be supplemented by examples from Soto Zen-Buddhism. A third step may be to briefly consider what has been historically at work in the modern phenomenon of separating communication and aesthetics from liturgy in religious practice. In Western modernity this can be traced back to the appearance in the twelfth century of what Ivan Illich calls the ‘bookish object’ and the nearly simultaneous adoption of clocks in European monasteries. These historical developments were fatal for the hitherto intimate bond between religious time, space and liturgy. Lastly, it may be that only by according religious liturgy its centrality in religious practice – which must not be confused with the modernist notion of religious experience – that the role of communication and aesthetics in religion is illuminated.

In several sermons, the Buddha said that ‘admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is the whole of the holy life’. Such spiritual friendship was typically cultivated in the monastic community of the sangha. But in contemporary contexts Buddhism is developing in various de-traditionalised and secularised forms. Individuals are able to study Buddhist texts online and practice meditation independently without associating with formal Buddhist organisations and without adopting formal religious precepts. How then does a contemporary Buddhist form such admirable companionship? In this paper, I will first suggest that the online discussion forum, DhammaWheel, functions as a sangha, or more precisely, a cybersangha. As one member puts it, ‘DhammaWheel is my community of practice. I wouldn't be taking additional precepts today were it not for the support and encouragement of this community’. Secondly, I will propose that in discussing Buddhist ideas from within the context of their everyday experience, the members of DhammaWheel are ‘doing theory’ on contemporary Buddhism and are indeed producing ideas which might contribute to contemporary Buddhist thought. I do this in order to speculate on the implications of the cybersangha on contemporary Buddhist scholarship. I will suggest that to better understand how Buddhism develops in the present age, contemporary Buddhist scholars could beneficially adopt the views and methods of communication and cultural studies to engage with the cybersangha, and perhaps even develop ‘admirable camaraderie’ with Buddhists outside the academy.