The Mass Media and Faith: The Potentialities and Problems for the Church in Our Television Culture
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay examines meaning and impact of message about Christian religious institutions delivered by mass media, especially television. Drawing on insights of media theorist Marshall McLuhan, argument seeks to broaden an understanding of these media, and, proposes that although it might seem that contradictory messages are conveyed-on one hand, that church is irrelevant; on other, that religion is important-these are fundamentally same. There is a message, shaped by use, nature, and structure of a particular medium; and this message powerfully affects patterns in which humans receive and comprehend information. Understanding this primary message, as related to portrayals of religion in media, is an important part of church's task as it faces problems and potentialities of a mass-mediated culture. Season five, episode two, of Sex and City is entitled Unoriginal Sin. Miranda, one of four main characters-all of whom are perpetually single females living in New York-has had a baby. The father of baby is her ex-boyfriend Steve, and pregnancy was unplanned. Steve has asked to have some role in his son's upbringing, but Miranda is primary caregiver. In this episode, Steve, a lapsed Roman Catholic, suggests that they have baby baptized; his reasons for suggesting this are twofold: it would make his mother very happy, and it would be a sort of insurance policy on their son's eternal life. Miranda is absolutely horrified. She considers atheism to be only choice for intelligent and modern human beings, and Sex and City program on whole supports this viewpoint with very little nuance. Miranda eventually agrees to baptism, but on her conditions. She meets with Roman Catholic priest in order to discuss baptism and is able to demand that in ceremony, there be no mention of original sin, the devil, evil, heaven, or repentance. Only then does she feel comfortable in allowing sacrament to proceed. In a voice-over, show tells us that the Church agreed to her demands because, in this day and age, Church is like a thirtysomething woman in New York: desperate.1 This episode offers us a snapshot of a very real message continually delivered to our Western society through mass media: religious faith is untenable and church, in trying to maintain itself as an institution structured around this obsolete faith, is desperate. However, this is not only message of mass media concerning religious faith. In fact, in our post-9/11 culture, with George W. Bush as President of United States, there is another, and apparently contradictory, message in strong circulation. The March 27, 2004 issue of TV Guide features a cover story entitled God and TV. The article describes plethora of television shows that center on issues of religious faith, including new shows Joan of Arcadia and Wonderfalls, as well as relatively veteran programs like 7th Heaven.2 God, article suggests, is a popular and sellable commodity in todays culture. Both a rabbi-Saul Berman of Sharr Shalom Synagogue in Toronto-and a Jesuit priest-John O'Brien, director of Jesuit Communications Desk-are quoted as pointing out that media is simply picking up on spiritual nature of human beings and on questions of faith that have arisen in our society since 9/11.3 Bill Roberts, president of Canada's faith-based Vision TV network, further explains that making faith experience for individuals more accessible, more meaningful and less, well, sort of dire is good. If you look at any of great spiritual traditions from Buddha to Christ, you know these were very popular and culturally close individuals. They were culturally close to their people.4 Unlike Sex and City episode, this magazine article tells a very different story about religious faith: religious faith is an important part of North American culture and can be found helpfully represented and reflected in mass media. …
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it