Thesis (M.A.)-- Brigham Young University. Dept. of Communications.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, The Divinity School, December 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005. / Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 167-174).

No description available.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005. / Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 167-174).

Thesis (Ph. D. in Religion)--Vanderbilt University, May 2010. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S. )--Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, 2005. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 2709. Typescript. Abstract precedes thesis as 3 preliminary leaves ( iii-v). Includes bibliographical references ( leaves 46-47 ).

The goal of this research is to define the intent for Christian moving-image media narratives in terms of Prophetic Imagination and to develop and describe the characteristics of a new biblically based genre for Christian moving-image media that incorporates intent, content, style, and form. The story of Jonah and the related message as ironic vision, in combination with a particular didactic narrative form (edutainment), creates a medium with a Prophetic Imagination result. This medium, which is at the same time the message, is termed Jonahre. This new genre proposes a fresh Christian purpose and possibility for using the moving-image media to tell stories. In terms of the paradigm of Prophetic Imagination, the challenge for Christian moving-image media is to establish a biblically based alternative consciousness in society that results in the invitation to live a Lifestyle of the Believer in and contrary to the lifestyle of the dominant culture. Christians find themselves in a paradigm somewhat similar to the ancient Israelites in exile, as Christianity and its message have become de-centralized by the popular culture in a dominant postmodern world with a secular worldview. The task thus of preaching, telling stories and communicating the Christian message through moving-image media is to subvert these dominant ideologies through a God-given message. This message should carry a transformative revelatory purpose to glorify God and establish a biblical Christian outlook on life and the world that goes beyond merely a Christian veneer. Producers of narratives with a Christian worldview can no longer depend on simply using secular formats to convey Christian messages, as is currently often done with moving-image media. Instead, both content and form must be biblically based and have the same intent and purpose. This demands a new format for Christian moving-image narratives that aims at laying claim to the icons that dominate the secular “empire” so that they may be conscripted for the purpose of establishing a Christian worldview among the inhabitants with an empire consciousness. For the development of this new genre, the narrative of the book of Jonah as model of biblical storytelling is examined by means of socio-rhetorical criticism and communication theory. The communication as rich tapestry of interwoven textual textures is considered to find the basis for elements of a Prophetic Imagination narrative that educates in Biblical truth while entertaining the dominant cultural audience through an ironical, didactic style. / Prof. J.H. Coetzee

This dissertation considers sites of religious broadcast designed for and used by Protestant television evangelists in the postwar United States. It interrogates both the transformation of ritual space as it relates to and is infused by broadcast media, and the architectural and infrastructural adaptations that conditioned such spaces as a result of this mediation. These ritual sites, either retrofitted to accommodate television or designed explicitly for its technology between the late 1950s and the early 1980s, emerged in a period marked both by the ascendance of television broadcasting and by the increasing cultural and political visibility of conservative Protestantism in the United States. While the architecture of television evangelistic practice has also evolved in ways that parallel, and often complicate, changes in mainstream ecclesiastical architecture in the twentieth century, the protagonists of this narrative do not fall into two better-documented genealogies—neither the history of denominationally specific church consulting and the practical guidance penned in its support, nor accounts of high architectural, often academic, reflection on sacred space. Instead, the architecture of these often culturally marginal practices has been critically segregated from much other religious and spiritual construction, despite its effective proliferation across the American landscape to this very day. The wake of this bias leaves resultant lacunae in scholarly and critical attention, which this dissertation works in part to fill. In beginning to account for this history, I examine a variety of evangelical spaces—mostly worship spaces, but also broadcast stations, hospitals, and university campuses—and draw upon their archival and textual traces. Primary case studies in California, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Virginia are framed by questions of style and typology, examined alongside contemporary theories and criticisms of mass mediation, and located in relation to histories of mediated healing practices and apocalyptic thinking. This specific ritual architecture, which the dissertation terms televangelical space, not only negotiated between received ideas of the sacred and newer discourses around twentieth-century media, building practices, and community structures, but also raised the issue of conservative Christianity’s fundamental relationship to the modern world. It traced a basic ambivalence about the relationship between the contemporary and the sacred, and about the relationship between religious practice and the technological realities and cultural habits of an increasingly mediated and increasingly atomized present. I suggest that the historical materialization of this negotiation generated both new kinds of ecclesiastical architecture and spatial effects that transcended its walls. Rather than insist on the relevance of the spaces of broadcast religion according to a rubric of aesthetic value, this project examines them for what they can reveal both about architecture for and with media and about the transformation of spirituality and community under new forms of mediation.

The thesis tries to search for a methodology with which to critique the role of the SABC's religious broadcasts in reflecting the South African crisis and negotiations during the apartheid and transition periods (1972-1992). It suggests the future restructuring of religious broadcasting in the light of this analysis. This thesis presents philosophical, theological, scientific, political, economic, social and cultural processes that marked the paradigmatic shift from the arcane Middle Ages to the Modern Age. These are tended as contours to both critique and restructure the South African Broadcasting Corporation's (SABC) religious broadcasting beyond Public Service Broadcasting into Community Religious Broadcasting pertinent to the meta-modern epoch. This thesis asserts that science, along with political, economic, and cultural processes, have been separated from their theological and cognitive roots. There is a gap between these processes and the human subject's thinking and faith activities. It asserts that scientific methodology alone is inadequate to analyse the SABC as a scientific phenomenon. It claims that using scientific methodologies of both mainstream and critical-Marxist paradigms alone may lead to methodological reductionism. It proposes that both mainstream (rational) and critical-Marxist (praxis) methodologies must be linked to cognitive (metaphysical) methodology. The inadequacy of science has brought this thesis to a methodological crisis. This crisis is demonstrated as a micro-crisis of the meso-crisis, which in turn is part of a macro-crisis. On the method micro-level the crisis is symptomatic of the micro-crisis caused by the separation of science from philosophy, which prejudices intuition in favour of rationality on the paradigmatic level. On the agenda level, which is the meso-level, the crisis manifests itself in the separation of philosophy from theology, which prejudiced theology in favour of philosophy. Finally on the macro-level the crisis shows itself as dualistic separation of subject-object uni-formity from subject-object uni-diversity, which prejudiced objectivity against subjectivity on the discourse level. Below I illustrate the theory-praxis crisis: From the theory-macro-uni-diversity level, a normalivistic stance, namely orthodoxical plane, the meso-crisis can be conceived as either heterodoxical or homodoxical. Heterodoxical crisis leads to heresiodoxical praxis and homodoxical leads to orthopraxis. From the praxis-micro-uniformity level, a normalivistic stance, namely orthopraxis plane, the meso-crisis can be conceived as either heteropraxical or homopraxical. Heteropraxis leads to heresiodoxy and homopraxis leads to orthodoxy. The thesis holds both ends of the object-subject dialectics, i.e. action follows being and being follows action. The emphasis on the former leads to idealism and the emphasis on the latter, to rationalism. The dialectic reaction to rationalism leads to scientific-materialism. The thesis further argues that both rationalism and materialism must be relinked to idealism in order to emancipate the human subject from either arcane or modern subordination. This emancipation, the thesis asserts, will lead to meta-modern community-based democracy and broadcasting. To tackle the question of whether theory informs praxis or praxis informs theory, the thesis bases itself on the perichosis-tri-tension of traditional view-stance, personal view-stance and praxis-stance. It navigates between the streams of hetero-consciousness and homo-consciousness, between liberal and critical paradigms, and between critical and hermeneutic theory\praxis. That navigation and the rethinking of both African and Occidental public spheres, afforded this thesis a cognitive-interpreting-praxis. That cognitive-interpreting-praxis is employed to critique the SABC in general and its religious broadcasting in particular. The critique amplified the root-cause, among others, of the crisis between SABC as a signifying practice and the reality of South African society between 1972 and 1992, as the bias of the SABC in favour of the then ruling White Hegemony. That White Hegemony is precisely, this thesis argues, the result of the separation of Africans from their traditional African polity and subsequent alienation from their land and stock, reminiscent of the separation of the Occidental subjects from these selfsame factors as a result of the arcane Middle Ages authority and land tenure. This separation, along with industrialization, brought about the massification of South African society, which was represented by the SABC (acting as a 'PSB') as a consensual but separate community of minorities. Finally, the thesis tries to map a way for the future in religious broadcasting in South Africa beyond the SABC as PSB, by proposing a community based religious broadcasting model. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1994.