The latest issue of Social Anthropology (sub. req.) contains a debate on religion and media between Charles Hirschkind and Matthew Engelke. Additionally, it features articles on religion and media by Birgit Meyer, Patrick Eisenlohr, and Martijn Oosterbaan.

From Eisenlohr’s introduction to the issue:

Anyone posing the question “What is a medium?” has to confront the great multiplicity and range of the items and phenomena that have been considered a medium in the scholarly literature. Certainly, for many authors the field of media vastly exceeds the realm of communication technology in an everyday sense. To given an impression, in a recent survey of the field, the following objects and phenomena were listed as having been labelled a medium: a wheel, a mirror (McLuhan); a school class, a soccer ball, a waiting room (Flusser); the electoral system, a general strike, the street (Baudrillard); a horse, a dromedary, the elephant (Virilio); money, power and influence (Parsons); art, belief and love (Luhmann) …

The contributors, in trying to formulate an anthropological approach to media, are drawn to issues relating to the religious, partially through an engagement with the work of Hent de Vries.

See the full table of contents here.