Studying religion, audiovisual media, and the production of the ‘religious real’: introducing a review symposium on Birgit Meyer’s Sensational Movies (2015)

Abstract

This article introduces a review symposium on Birgit Meyer’s book Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). It summarizes the structure and argument of the book, presents the six contributions to the review symposium as well as Meyer’s response, and in closing relates the religious use of audiovisual media to theoretical debates on documentary film in order to reflect on the production of what could be called the ‘religious real.’