Book Review: New Media and Communication across Religions and Cultures, edited by Isaac Nahon-Serfaty and Rukhsana Ahmed

Abstract

New Media and Communication across Religions and Cultures. Isaac Nahon-Serfaty and Rukhsana Ahmed, eds. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, 2014. xxi + 304 pp. $195 hbk.In October 2009, three dozen scholars, media professionals, and community activists from North America, South America, and Europe gathered for a daylong workshop at the University of Ottawa to examine normative issues at the crossroads of communication and religion. Representing disciplines from art, communication studies, and political science to philosophy, religion, and semiotics, the participants scrutinized interfaith practices of religious groups and cultures and religious dimensions of media organizations and productions. For this anthology, University of Ottawa associate professors of communication Isaac Nahon-Serfaty and Rukhsana Ahmed selected nine of the workshop papers and solicited five others. result is a multi-disciplinary collection of papers that highlight ongoing concerns about public dimensions of religion.A few of the chapters stand out. Cult Wars on the Internet by Susan Palmer, a professor of religious studies at Dawson College in Montreal, explains how new religious movements (NRMs) experience cyberspace as both a weapon and a shield. Bypassing commercial media not only allows NRMs to define themselves, but it also makes NRMs vulnerable to secularists who depict them as harmful and to religious opponents who depict them as heretical. Using examples from the Raelians, the Church of Scientology, Hare Krishna, and Falun Gong, Palmer shows how NRM leaders struggle to correct media rumors, to create and maintain evenhanded Wikipedia entries, and to block attacks on their websites. Online challenges increasingly come from dissident members who, as Palmer points out, are sometimes able to instigate reforms within NRMs.Another notable chapter is by Ronald I. Cohen, the National Chair of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) from 1993 until 2011, who explains how the CBSC has responded to complaints about television and radio broadcasts related to religion. A complaint about the short-lived network program, Dieu recoit (God Receives), resulted in the CBSC finding that the show was neither anti-Catholic nor disdainful of any individual believer despite its irreverent depiction of God as a scrawny, mustachioed, bespectacled administrator who viewed the past, present, and future on his oracle viewing screen. By contrast, the CBSC upheld a complaint about an R. W. Schambach sermon on Power Today in which the evangelist called homosexuals devils and demon possessed. According to Cohen, The right to speak freely does not, in the view of the CBSC, supersede the right of identifiable groups to be free from abusive or unduly discriminatory comment on the basis of, among other things, their religion. …