using the readings, please complete test 1450 PS. there is also a book that i will pass onto you once you download the rest of the class readings

In order to interpret religion and media as bodily experience we need to understand the literary, visual, and aural“texts”(including movies, television programs, novels, newspapers, magazines, music, video games, and websites as well as more traditional religious art and architecture) through which religious and secular media evoke human responses.

Esthetic interpretations deepen our description and understanding of both religious art and religion itself.

Understanding media, religion, and culture requires paying attention to the material“stuff”of religion, to religious texts, physical and digital spaces, and the sounds that give religion a voice, as well as to what people do with this stuff.

Without a clear picture of the material, we are unlikely to understand what people are doing with it. Consider, for instance, the elaborate carvings of saints in theConvento e Igreja de São Francisco(Convent and Church of Saint Francis) in the city of Salvador, Brazil. Many people describe it as a beautiful example of early eighteenth-century Portuguese-inspired religious architecture and call attention to the exuberant gold leaf that gilds the multitude of carvings and statues of Christian saints and angels. A more careful examination, however, reveals that many of these statues are distorted. Faces appear to be anguished.

Female saints appear to be pregnant. Cherubim have enlarged sexual organs.

Attention to these surprising details might lead us to ask who carved these sta- tues. This“Portuguese”church was built by African slave labor and the car- vings done by enslaved artisans. Tourists who merely tick it offas one more of many churches that they will visit during their trip are likely to miss the slave resistance built into the church. And if they miss that, they are likely to mis- understand the complex relationship of Afro-Brazilians to the religion of their oppressors. This chapter is designed to encourage readers to read, listen, and watch more carefully as they engage with particular material expressions of religion. Inter- esting and informative interpretations of religious images or objects, the ways that participants use them, and their contribution to creating religious worlds rest on clear descriptions of the mediations themselves. In this esthetic approach we seek to describe, culturally locate, and reflect on particular religious objects, spaces and actions. What, for example, might anobjectsuch as a calligraphied Qur’an passed down within a family or alocationsuch as the website of a Hindu monastery on the island of Kauai tell us about the religious traditions that produced them and the traditions’interaction with culture and media? What does anactionsuch as a Jewish mother’s ritual lighting of Shabbat candles or the posting of a confession on the PostSecret website reveal about a religious world? What does asoundsuch as the“keen,”or vocal lament, at a pre-Christian Celtic funeral or the music of a Muslim punk band like Britain’s Alien Kulture tell us about the religious experience of a people? Esthetic analysis helps us more fully describe and experience these particular expressions and then see how theyfitinto broader patterns, rhythms, and genres. These approaches are sometimes described as the“close reading”of the mediations of religion.

No single esthetic form or practice fully explains a religion. Religions in which sacred texts are important also have spaces and rituals. So a full picture of a religion requires that we attend to the range of esthetic experiences of the practitioners, that we see its spaces, read its texts, hear its sounds, and smell its smells. No student of religion has the full range of skills to interpret every aspect of the material and practice of religion. Scholars, like practitioners themselves, may have physical or sensual limitations that constrain their experience of the religion; they mayfind more personal satisfaction in some forms than others, or have the training to see some aspects of a religion and not others. No individual experience or portrait of a religion is in this sense complete. Yet the careful student seeks to develop the critical skills needed to provide as full a picture as possible.

Developing critical skills The abstract painter Jackson Pollock, who lived in thefirst half of the twentieth century, was famous for dripping paint onto huge canvases. People who have not honed the critical tools that it takes to understand Pollock’s experiments with color and form sometimes dismiss the work with a statement like “Myfive-year-old could do that.”To take another example, when people say about a sciencefictionfilm or romantic novel“They are all the same,”it is often because they lack the skills or interest to see how particularfilms or novels create variations within these familiar patterns. Similarly, when someone says that all Muslims are the same, it is likely because that person has not closely observed the varieties of Islamic practice or considered the complex way in which religions participate in the struggles and assumptions of particular cultures and time periods. 124Ethics and esthetics The typical readers of this book have probably already taken classes on lit- erature, art, film, or music, where they developed tools of humanistic descrip- tion and interpretation, and classes on philosophy, rhetoric, or communications designed to sharpen critical thinking. These skills contribute to the “close reading ”of the mediations of religion. They allow the observer to describe more clearly the particular mediation of religion, therefore o ffering a more nuanced interpretation and, in turn, deepening the observer ’s esthetic experience. Bring- ing esthetic re flection to bear on the objects and practices of religion helps us to see them more clearly, to understand how they are like and di fferent from other religious objects and actions, and identify the response they evoke in the body. Art creates and comments on a world, and religious art creates and com- ments on a religious world. Paying close attention to the elements of narrative (e.g. character, narration, plot, and dialogue), visual composition (e.g. point of view, angle, editing, lighting, and color), and musical structure (e.g. meter, timbre, and rhythm) provides a clearer picture of the forms of these created worlds, their internal structures and logic. Attending to such aspects can be challenging for an observer in his or her first encounter with that world.

Developing the critical skills to identify and interpret its mediated forms deepens one ’s understanding of any faith tradition or new religious practice.

Practitioners of religions with sacred writings have long meditated on these texts. Believers study the sacred writings, and the language and images from the texts move into practice, shaping private and public worship and serving as ethical and imaginative guides to life. They produce elaborate, visually beautiful versions of the texts, transforming them into sacred objects. Of course, not all mediations of religion are literary. The mediation of a religion might be graphic, as with the petroglyphs in the Teton Mountains of Wyoming that illustrate the spirit world of the ancient Shoshone (Figure 8.1), or the icons of saints looking down from the dome of a Greek Orthodox Church. The religious experience might be mediated aurally, as when the Muslim call to prayer resonates across Tehran, or when a Pentecostal seized by the Holy Spirit speaks in tongues.

Think also of incense, the smell of yak butter lamps at a Tibetan monastery, and other smells that evoke particular religious responses, and embodied forms like dance, procession, and spirit possession that evoke the sacred. Understanding these forms of expression more clearly provides a vocabulary to describe religious experience.

Reading: texts and their ritual use As discussed in earlier chapters, literacy changed religious communities in ways we probably do not fully understand. Stories, histories, and records that once existed as oral traditions were written down. When that happened they were codi fied, which meant that only particular versions of the traditions were legitimated and preserved. Writing became a space where religious ideas could be developed and contested. Authority once given to those who could Reading, listening, watching 125 remember and recite now passed to those who could read and write. In many traditions particular texts came to be viewed as uniquely connecting the believer to the sacred. Thus, for over 150 years Protestant children, often before they can read, have been taught to sing“Jesus loves me! This I know, for the Bible tells me so ”(Warner 1860). The hymn implies that faith in Jesus is not simply con firmed by experience but by the text that is sacred to Christian tradition. This power of the sacred text is so great that it is venerated even by believers who may not yet read. To understand religions where reading is so important we will want to know more about their texts.

Texts Studying the form and content of the religious texts themselves deepens our understanding of the religion and the way participants relate to the texts. What are these texts about, how are they organized, and what literary forms and genres are used? As the Protestant children described above begin to read the Christian Bible, they will discover that it is a collection of writings containing a wide variety of di fferent kinds of literature. There are histories, poems, stories, and laws. Di fferent books of the Bible, and even sections of books, were written by di fferent people at di fferent times and often with unique concerns or agendas. Biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan suggests that some are myths that explain things like the origin of the world or the reasons for living piously.

Some are apologies, stories that justify something such as the organization of society. At the other extreme, some are parables that attack the organization of society, pointing out and mocking its inconsistencies (1973). Recognizing these di fferent literary forms allows the reader to read them in relationship to other Figure 8.1 Petroglyphs 126Ethics and esthetics material in the Bible, compare and contrast them to other stories in the cultures that produced them, and think about how these sacred stories are similar to and different from the sacred texts of other traditions. With this background the reader is more likely to notice particular patterns, characters, and events.

For instance, recognizing a story as a parable cues the reader to watch for the element that would surprise and shock the original hearers of the story.

Of course, religion’s mediation through reading and writing is not limited to sacred texts. The Protestant children described above will discover that their co-religionists write their faith in tracts and on Sunday School posters; they express it on billboards, bumper stickers, and in digital spaces. Representatives of many religions use printed texts to offer instruction manuals for the faithful; create religious stories, poems, and novels; write sometimes competing his- tories; debate interpretations of sacred texts; issue judgments on religious law; articulate theologies; and argue among themselves. They also write tracts for potential converts, letters to the editor, editorials, and press releases expressing their position on issues in society. They use writing for internal communication and to engage those outside their community. Attending to all of these practices expands our picture of mediated religion.

Much of modern education is focused on producing more sophisticated readers. Students start with fairly simple critical tasks, such as identifying the characters and actions in a story. They learn to put the narrative in order, identifying causality and chronology. They learn to analyze characters’motivation.

Teachers urge their students to identify the conflict at the core of the story and to ask how it is resolved and how characters are changed by the resolution.

Studying literature encourages a reader to think in more complex ways about narratives, recognize a wider range of literary types, and put each story in its literary, historical, and cultural contexts. Cultural criticism teaches the reader to wonder how issues of power such as race, class, gender, and sexual orientation shape the context of the author, how she or he draws on or challenges the norms of the culture within which the story was written, and how these mat- ters shape the perspective of the reader. Because sacred texts arefirst of all texts, subject to the same interpretive processes as other texts, developing skills as readers helps us understand and interpret the religious text, the religious tradition and culture in which it is practiced.

Ritual use of texts How and where are sacred texts read? Are they more than simply the con- tainers of information? Are they objects to be venerated? Are they displayed and handled in particular ways? Do particular people read them at particular times? Asking such questions can give us clues about the religions that are associated with each text.

Consider the way that modern Jews treat the Torah. The consecrated space of a synagogue includes an ark, an ornate cabinet, often with a curtain over it, which contains a Torah scroll. This copy of the Torah is not printed like aReading, listening, watching127 modern book; it is a beautiful scroll written in Hebrew that must be rolled out to the appropriate passage. At the appropriate time it is reverently taken out and carried to thebema, a raised platform from which it is read. These ritual spaces and actions proclaim the sacredness of the Torah, both the object and its message, and set a context for its reading. In the ritual of bar or bat mitzvah, during which an observant Jew becomes an adult member of the faith community, the honoree comes to thebemato read a passage from the Torah.

Other religions have ritual uses of their own sacred texts, some within the consecrated worship space and others in more public spaces. When an American football fan holds up a placard reading“John 3:16,”the use of this verse from the New Testament is intended to bring the sacred content of the Christian scriptures into the profane public square and perhaps to lead readers to seek out the content of this passage.

Writing is also one way that religions critique each other, and religion itself is contested. As with any other subject, we can learn about religion by reading what its critics have to say about its ideas and rituals. One might read atheist Richard Dawkins’sThe God Delusion(2006), for instance, or an editorial in a Hindi newspaper about the actions and motivations of Buddhists in a region where members of the two traditions contest for political power and the con- trol of sacred spaces. Considering the arguments of a religion’s detractors not only sheds light on the particular religion but also on the religious worldview of the writer.

Reading as metaphor Learning to read is a powerful experience that gives the new reader access to a wider world. Perhaps for this reason reading a written text serves as a common metaphor for what happens when people engage in other esthetic experiences.

Therefore other mediations are sometimes called“texts”and the process of engaging with them referred to as“reading.”Thus, the critical viewer might be described as“reading”afilm and the critical listener as“reading”a song or symphony. The allusion to reading can be helpful in that it reminds us that apprehending is an act of interpretation. Yet this analogical thinking can be problematic when it leads us to reduce afilm to its dialogue or a song to its lyrics.

Such a reduction imperfectly describes our esthetic experience. Watching a movie or hearing a piece of music requires attention to much more than the words. When religion and media scholarsfirst began to study popular music, they tended to focus almost entirely on the lyrics. Doing so reduces the songs to narrative texts without attending to how musical form interacts with the words, which contributes to our experience of the piece as a whole. Music theory reminds the listener that the piece is more fully understood if we give attention to matters of musical form like rhythm, meter, and vocal quality and to the influence of musical genres like opera, gospel, pop, and hip hop.

The analogy to reading remains powerful because it reminds us that there are certain skills required to fully participate in an esthetic experience. In learning 128Ethics and esthetics to read, almost everyonefirst struggles to recognize individual letters and then to assemble them into words and sentences and paragraphs. As readers become more adept they begin to recognize and understand narrative patterns, characters, and themes. By becoming more attentive readers they begin to make sense of new literary forms, deepening their appreciation of literature. A similar learning curve is necessary with the other arts through which religion might be mediated.

Listening: music, speech and silence “ Reading, ”in the metaphorical sense described just above also involves open- ing one ’s ears. Listening is a key skill for those who want to understand religion and religious experience. Listening is itself a religious discipline. When Su fis gather for the practice that they call Samaor“listening, ”they play music and dance ecstatically. They explain that dancing opens them to the divine music, whose source is the deity. Jews and Christians cite the story of the Prophet Elijah (I Kings 11 –13), who experiences the Holy One of Israel not in great wind, earthquake, or fire, but in a “still small voice. ”For these practitioners, listening is a way to experience the sacred, to be open to the presence of deity. When we listen to religion, we seek to identify the sounds, the speech acts, and the silences that are part of a particular religious ritual, experience, or tradition.

Attending to aural expression of religion raises questions about religious practice.

What might the clear, high-pitched tone of the Tibetan tingshabell tell us about Buddhist meditation? Does the sheer volume of a Pentecostal worship service blasting from the speakers on the roof of a Guatemalan chapel express something about the Pentecostal Christians ’understanding of the actions of the Holy Spirit or illuminate their relationship to their neighbors? What do the sumbel , or toasts, o ffered to the gods and the ancestors by Neopagan practitioners of the Old Norse religion of Ásatrúreveal about their hopes and concerns?

Music Learning to hear and appreciate music sharpens the listening skills and provides a vocabulary to describe more clearly the form and patterns of the sounds of religion (Figure 8.2). Though not all these sounds are musical, attention to rhythm, melody, and harmony trains the listener to experience the sound of religion in its complexity. In What to Listen for in Music(2009) composer Aaron Copland (1937 –2009) suggests that three things are going on at once when we listen to music. First we experience music on what he calls the “sensuous plane. ”This is our pure sensual appreciation of the music itself, before we have applied higher-order critical thinking to it. Next is the “expressive plane. ”Here our pleasure in the piece of music is related to its evocation of something outside the music, perhaps an emotion like happiness, anger, or sexual arousal; perhaps a sense of space, as the raging of a storm or the waves of the sea; per- haps a feeling such as patriotism or devotion. Copland says that it is on this plane that a piece of music is said to mean something. Finally, the composer Reading, listening, watching 129 informs us, the piece functions on a“musical plane, ”that of “the notes themselves and of their manipulation ”(Copland 2009: 21). On this third plane musical patterns are being developed and musical problems solved. Take the familiar “ Hallelujah Chorus ”from George Frideric Handel ’s Messiah . On the first plane, listeners simply experience the majestic music rolling over them. Though the piece contains words, it is the soaring sound of the choir that takes center stage.

On the second plane, the piece evokes a sense of triumphal accomplishment for many listeners. The music itself, the words of the chorus, and perhaps the lis- teners ’knowledge of the history of the piece may evoke Christ ’s resurrection, even in a secular concert hall. At the same time, musically trained listeners are attuned to the third plane, aware of how the Chorus resolves musical patterns and antecedents established earlier in the piece. While there are religious experiences that do not involve music, and even some religions that ban all or some forms of music, for the most part when religious communities gather, music is involved. In addition to the examples noted above, think of the drumming and singing that accompany the Sun Dance of the First Nations of North America, the throat singing of animistic Tuvan people of southern Siberia, or the kaguraperformed to entertain the gods at Shinto shrines in Japan. The combination of music and ritual is used in a similar way in civil ceremonies like the opening of the Olympics, memorial gatherings honoring the war dead or the inauguration of national leaders in order to lend a sense of the sacred to these enterprises. Certainly, music is not the only sound of religion. The tramp of feet in procession, the sound of water poured out in baptism, and the murmur of Figure 8.2 Pre-school choir 130Ethics and esthetics prayers are each part of the sound of religion at work. As with religious texts, these sounds are not limited to the formal ritual spaces of religion; practitioners carry them into other spaces of their lives. At Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry the country songs of hard work and lost love are interspersed with Southern gospel music. The names of deities are invoked in unexpected places for both sacred and profane purposes. One can hear Buddhist prayerflagsflap in the wind outside both houses in Lhasa, Tibet, and dorm rooms in San Francisco, California.

Speech A central sound of religion is that of human speech. In a range of traditions the ritual includes some combination of songs sung, sacred texts read aloud, prayers uttered, liturgies chanted, excommunications pronounced, stories from the tradition told, sermons or other proclamations made aloud, and periods of silence. In the Seder ritual a young Jew asks,“Why is this night different from all other nights?”A Zen master lays out a koan, asking the initiate,“What is the sound of one hand clapping?”At an American Thanksgiving dinner, each guest is often asked to name something for which she or he is thankful. Speech, like music, is aural—made up of sounds that fall upon the ear. It can give sensual pleasure or grate on the ear, regardless of the content of the words that comprise it. Though usually less formally so than music, speech is patterned, and we owe our satisfaction as listeners in part to the way the words are both organized and vocalized. If the text of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s“I Have a Dream”speech were reproduced here, many readers wouldfind it a moving call for racial justice. But the full power of the speech is inseparable from the cadences of King’s voice, his rhythms and repetitions of language. Just as Copland reminds us that there is a purely musical plane in the appreciation of music, there is a plane of the pure sound of speech. Consider the fact that the spoken delivery of a message is called a“speech;”this word emphasizes that listeners to a speech are invited to hear not only the content but also the way the words are spoken. Hearing a speech rather than just reading the text provides access to the cadences of delivery and the modulations of the voice, and thus gives greater access to the emotional impact of the words on those whofirst heard them spoken.

Silence There is much sound in religion, but silence is also important. One of the patterns within the sounds of religion is the periods of reflective silence. In the monastic traditions in Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism, people may commit themselves to lives of silent reflection. For others silence is a more intermittent practice, with silent retreats, periods of meditation, or times of silence during worship services to invite private prayer or reflection. In fact, the travel section of theWall Street Journalreports that the silent retreat has become a part of the commodification of religion, with monasteries and retreat centersReading, listening, watching131 marketing to persons of any or no religious tradition as a form of vacation from the busyness of modern life (WSJ, September 7, 2012).

Watching Much of the mediation of religion is visual. From the ancient Egyptians’Great Sphinx of Giza, to Katsina dolls of the Pueblo people, to the Buddhist prayer tattooed on the back of movie star Angelina Jolie, religion is found in images and objects that invite the gaze. In medieval times cathedrals rose above European towns, making a visual statement about the dominance of the Christian God and the spread of Christendom. Biblical images along with pictures of the saints and martyrs are a central theme of European art history and are reproduced in sundry places such as Sunday school illustrations and refrigerator magnets.

Similarly, the panoply of Hindu gods can be seen throughout Southeast Asia on images and statues in temples and museums but also painted on buses and placed on home altars.

There is theatricality to religious rituals, they involve performance, the manip- ulation of objects and spaces, and sometimes great spectacle. This is particularly evident in mass events: the sight of tens of thousands of Hindus gathering to bathe in the Ganges River in order to attain spiritual cleansing, of white-robed Candomblé practitioners joining the brightly dressed participants in the streets during Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival, or of crowds gathering in Vatican Square in March of 2013 to await the smoke that would announce the election of Pope Francis paints religion large upon the landscape. There is theatricality in much smaller rituals as well. Practitioners express religious faith and identity when they gather and watch worship services or festivals, religious television, or other media, and they recognize their co-religionists by their actions and the symbols they display in such events. Whether or not students of religion and other observers share these people’s faith they participate in a religious practice, if only as observers, when they watch a merchant burn incense before an image of the Buddha in her shop, read a bumper sticker announcing“Real men love Jesus,”or see an Elvis Presley fan tenderly hanging a picture of the performer in his home.

Recognizing this visual quality in religion, it behoves those who want to understand religion to pay attention to its visual spectacle. Much of religion’s mediation is constructed through visual images or moving pictures, and learn- ing about the history and construction of the visual arts andfilm will enrich our understanding of religion. To engage such mediations one must consider what sort of religious world is being made visible.

Movies, like paintings, have a frame and thefilm-maker or painter includes some things, and excludes others from within the frame. This simple insight reminds the viewer that the image is contrived, that it reflects esthetic and sometimes political and theological choices. Afilm-maker, photographer, or painter chooses what to include within the frame, and thus what to exclude.

Reflecting on this encourages a critical viewer of religions to ask what is 132Ethics and esthetics included and excluded, and who has the authority to make these decisions.

Learning to reflect on a painting or afilm teaches one to consider the com- position of the image, what do we see, and how is it arranged? Who dominates the image and who is pushed to the edge or recedes into the background?

How are color and lighting used to encourage particular interpretations of what we see? How are these images, and stories they illumine, like and different from others?

Art, like religious practice, happens within or in reaction to a tradition. Pier Paulo Pasolini, the director ofThe Gospel According to Saint Matthew(1964), for instance, was influenced by the neo-realist style that developed in Italy following World War II. Italianfilm directors went out into the streets and countryside selecting their untrained actors for the visual quality of their faces and bodies rather than their acting skills. Understanding the neo-realist movement offilm making helps put the look ofThe Gospel According to Saint Matthewin context and invites the viewer to think about how Pasolini uses the stark hillsides and ancient Italian villages to stand in for biblical spaces and to think of the actors themselves as a sort of visual landscape through which he tells the story.

Considering a religious ritual as a visual event encourages the viewer to see it clearly, to ponder its juxtapositions and movements. Once, while traveling in a remote region of Guatemala, I visited a stone church in the colonial style.

At the front before an altar several Catholic priests said the mass in Spanish.

Toward the back, directly down the central aisle Mayan priests carried out their traditional rituals in Quichean. Between them a handful of worshipers appeared to be caught visually, religiously, and culturally between two traditions. Atfirst glance the two groups of priests seemed to compete for the attention and loyalty of the peasant worshipers. The Catholic priests occupied the front, and of course the church was arranged to focus the viewer on their actions. So a conventional visual interpretation suggests that the indigenous priests are usurpers in an alien space. But, picturing the worshipers as the center of this image alters my perspec- tive on this event. They gave no visual evidence of choosing sides or shifting focus. Perhaps what I was seeing was not two competing rituals but one more complex ritualization of the religion of the region. If so, then something more complex than religious conflict is mediated in that space, and considering what it looked like is crucial to understanding how religion and religious identities were being constructed there.

Participating—attention to our bodily reactions My experience in the Guatemalan sanctuary that seemed sacred to some combination of Catholic and Mayan sensibilities serves as reminder that our interactions with religion whether in physical or digital space are embodied.

Whether we enter into them as practitioners, students of religion, or tourists, they evoke our own bodily sensations. Recalling that particular religiously complex space, the ritual and the people involved, evokes my bodily memory of the smells of bodies and incense, the brutal heat of the sun baking the highReading, listening, watching133 wooden roof and drifting through open doorways, the smoke of thefire that the Mayan priests tended drifting in the shaded sanctuary, the jostle of other bodies in the space, the imagined taste of the host and other sacrifices, and the sight of the gathered worshipers and the priests at work.

When bathing in the Ganges, Sufidancing, drinking communion wine, and in many other acts, religion is mediated through the body. Whether people engage with mediations of religion on the page of ancient texts, in a sacred space, on a movie screen, or in a digital location, they do not leave their bodies behind. In digital space our human sensate response may depend more on the eye and the ear, but the body responds, our pulse may calm or quicken, we may be attracted, interested, or bored. Developing the esthetic skills of reading, listening, and watching helps the practitioner to more fully experience the tra- dition and assists the observer in describing and interpreting them in ways that “flesh out”one’s understanding of religious practices. Interpretations are rooted not only in theory but in bodily sensation. Discussion questions 1 What training have you had in studying arts such as literature, visual art,film, music, or architecture? How might you draw on this training in studying religion and media?

2 Describe a religious event (a worship service, a pilgrimage, a mourning site, etc.) that you have observed or participated in as an esthetic experience. How is the space organized? What sounds, smells, and sights guide the participants’experience of the sacred? What are people doing with their bodies? What do we learn about the particular event, the tradition, and/or religion in general by paying attention to these things?

3 An esthetic approach trains us to pay attention to patterns and genres.

It asks how is this particular experience like, and different from, other seemingly similar experiences. Read a religious text, listen to a piece of sacred music, or continue to think about the religious event you considered in the previous question. What esthetic patterns do you observe? What do they contribute to the experience?

4 Attention to esthetics makes us aware of how a painter orfilm-maker directs the viewers’attention by framing, composition, and lighting and how a storyteller shapes the tale and controls the available infor- mation to produce particular effects. Are religious experiences similarly staged to produce particular spiritual effects?

5 What are the implications of thinking of religion as an esthetic, sensual, and bodily experience? What does an esthetic approach to the study of religion and media add to our understandings of the mediation of religion? 134Ethics and esthetics 6. In the reflections that follow, Clanton discusses how the musical ele- ments and lyrics in a Katy Perry video come together, while Plate thinks about how a particular camera movement has similar meaning in a variety of quite differentfilms. Both suggest that these secular popular entertainments draw on religious concepts that are commu- nicated esthetically. Does such an analysis give you a richer experience of video andfilms? Why, or why not? What does it suggest about the way the religious is present in seemingly secular culture? References Copland, Aaron (2009)What to Listen for in Music, New York: New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA), Inc.

Crossan, John Dominic (1973)In Parables: The Challenge of the Historical Jesus, New York:

Harper and Row.

Dawkins, Richard (2006)The God Delusion, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Wall Street Journal(WSJ) (2012)“Don’t Say a Word,”September 7.

Warner, Susan (1860)Jesus Loves Me, #191 in the 1989 edition ofThe United Methodist Hymnal, Nashville: The United Methodist Publishing House. Reading, listening, watching135 Reflection Creating mythology through cinematography S. Brent Plate Movie after movie begins the same way: In the beginning is the extreme long shot of the sky above, then the camera tilts down to the social order here below. Each shot progressively creates a tighter and tighter frame until we zoom in on the main characters who are involved in some sort of con flict: human vs. human, human vs. alien, human vs. self.

Hundreds of movies have begun with a similar structure, but here we will compare the first few shots of three totally di fferent productions:

the science fiction Star Wars :Episode IV (dir. George Lucas, 1977), the surrealistic suspense Blue Velvet(dir. David Lynch, 1986), and the dark comedy Bad Santa (dir. Terry Zwigo ff, 2003). None of these is a “reli- gious film ”per se, but each uses cinematography to create a narrative that is akin to the mythologizing process at the heart of religious practice. To get into the deep structures of film-making is to find surprising parallels to the deep structures of religious traditions. At first, the universe appears in proper working order when looked at from far away. “God ’s in his heaven —All ’s right with the world! ”said poet Robert Browning (1947), and cinematographers delight in a God ’s eye view of things. In their opening shots, Blue Velvetoff ers up a clear blue day, while Star WarsandBad Santa give us the starry firmament.

Then the camera tilts down, and the shots that follow o ffer an image of the nomos , the social order “here below ”on earth that mirrors the cosmic order “up above. ”The second, third, and fourth shots in Blue Velvet bring us into a small town neighborhood with picket fences, friendly fi remen, and crossing guards (Figure 8.3). The camera in Bad Santabrings us to the interior space of O ’Hara ’s Pub, a nicely appointed bar with well-dressed, smiling people drinking white wine. Star Warsdoes not change shots so much as o ffers the scrolling “ prologue”which tells of the way things are going in the world that we the viewers are about to enter. Then comes the transition point, when the ordered cosmos and nomos give way to something not quite right, some sense of chaos lurking below the exteriors. Blue Velvet’s friction is marked by the appearance of a gun on television, and the rattling water spigot of a man irrigating his lawn.

Bad Santa closes in on a sad-looking man (Billy Bob Thornton) in a Santa suit at the end of the bar; he gives a drunken, profanity-laden voiceover narration as he stares into a mirror smoking a cigarette.Star Warsevokes chaos as the camera finishes tilting down, the high-percussion music swells, and ultimately two spacecraft are engaged in a laser-shooting battle —and then we go inside a ship to find the troubled Princess Leia.

The con flict is cemented as the depths of troubles of the characters are revealed: The man in Blue Velvethas a stroke and falls to the ground; “ Santa ”is seen vomiting in an alley outside the bar, Santa suit still intact; Princess Leia is captured by the ominous Darth Vader.

The same framing narrative is achieved in creation mythologies around the world, for example, in the first three chapters of Genesis. The biblical book ’s fi rst view is large, showing the expanses of the universe, which slowly builds toward the earth, other creatures, and finally to the protagonists:

Adam and Eve, at which point con flict also ensues.

And so the stories begin: cosmos leads to nomos, leads to chaos, leads to the ongoing battle between these realms. Myths, like films, utilize well-worn patterns of production, with the ultimate purpose of bringing the audience into the world of the narrative. Always similar enough to be familiar, but di fferent enough to be new and enticing: whether long ago and far away space travelers, or a drunken department store Santa, or a naked couple in a garden.

Reference Browning, Robert (1947) Pippa Passes and Shorter Poems , New York: The Odyssey Press.

Figure 8.3Blue Velvet opening shot Reading, listening, watching 137 Reflection Katy Perry ’s Firework Dan Clanton Katy Perry ’s number one hit Fireworkdraws on a familiar religious image, that of light. However, few listeners have paid close attention to the religious symbolism and the biblical subtext in the song ’s lyrics and accompanying video. While one does not have to engage the religious symbolism inherent in the song or its video, doing so allows one to place the song and its appeal in a broader context, perhaps alongside other songs such as the civil rights anthem, This Little Light of Mine. Doing so helps us see how the pop song makes an ethical claim and involves an evangelical invitation to the light.

Perry tells her listener —whom she assumes has feelings of isolation and inadequacy —that “there ’s a spark in you, ”and once they “ignite the light and let it shine, ”that “like a lightning bolt, your heart will glow. ”This internal light is “even brighter than the moon, ”and “now it ’s time to let it through. ”The point of the lyrics seems clear: Perry is encouraging her listeners to find strength and courage in themselves in order to not be Figure 8.4 Katy Perry afraid to be who they are, to live their lives proudly and confidently.

The song’s dance-hall beat, anthemic nature, and catchy chorus comple- ment the empowering lyrics, and encourage listeners to interact with it, either through sound or movement. Musically, the ascending tones and crescendo in the chorus, as well as the major key signature, lead the listener to Perry’s central affirmation, that the listener is aFireworkand, as such, the musical complements the lyrical. The video of the song accentuates this reading of the lyrics, as the viewer is shown images of emotionally abused children, a young woman ashamed of her body, a young cancer patient, and a young gay man. These brief scenes are interspersed with scenes of Perry singing whileflashes of light andfire- works shoot forth from her chest. Seeing these allows the other characters to act in order to resolve or improve their situations, and the video con- cludes with a crowd of people dancing, many of whom havefireworks shooting from them as well.

This imagery of light is used in a similar way in both Jewish and Christian thought. In Genesis 1.3, God commands there to be light, yet this is neither the sun nor the stars. Some Jewish scriptural interpreters hold this light to be the“splendor of the divine presence,”and others see this light as representing the spark of divinity that is present in each human, which longs to be returned to God through the performance of moral and ethical commandments. Similarly, in the Christian tradition light plays a key role. In Jesus’Sermon on the Mount, he tells his hearers that“You are the light of the world,”and admonishes them to“Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works”(Mat- thew 5.14–16). The Gospel of John claims that in Jesus there is life,“and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it”(1.4–5). Based on these Gospels, theologians have encouraged Christians to engage in ethical decision making and moral action based on their belief in Jesus. InFirework, Perry, whether consciously or not, draws on this religious sense that light expresses promise and invites ethical choice.Reading, listening, watching139