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Attaining an inclusive public space requires citizens as well as leaders to be religiously literate. Citizens and leaders do not need to become scholars of religion, but they need to understand the basics of religious identities. This chapter asserts that citizens must learn to listen to one another’s stories, to share their own, and to find areas of both agreement and disagreement. Religious literacy can happen through formal civic education, which can be part of teaching about religion in public schools, private schools, and higher education. As a comparison to the U.S., the chapter analyzes how religion is taught in public schools in Spain. The chapter also considers religion and the media, and asserts that journalists can play a role in promoting public understanding of religion in its diverse forms.

This chapter examines the extent to which parents in the US approached the media in relation to what they hoped to teach their teenage children about religion and spirituality. It explains two very different expectations of parents regarding the media. These is the expectation that the media provides viable role models for others and the sense that the media should raise social issues for young people. It suggests that parents' thoughts about the media–religion relationship are influence by how they define religion.

Ongoing debates about the “return of religion” have paid little attention to the orgiastic and enthusiastic qualities of religiosity, despite a significant increase in the use of techniques of trance and possession around the globe. Likewise, research on religion and media has neglected the fact that historically the rise of mediumship and spirit possession was closely linked to the development of new media of communication. In order to invoke the transcendental, to make otherworldly beings and powers appear, trance mediums need to make dispositions and take great care in preparing a setting conducive to their work of mediation. Their equipment includes technical media, apparition and apparatus are linked through ritual techniques. Likewise, the discourses and the imaginary of trance mediumship powerfully anticipated and shaped technical media such as photography, cinema, the telephone, and television. Spirits and their mediums served as the media a priori for the ‘‘invention’’ of these technical media: spirits were able to ‘‘telesee’’ and ‘‘telehear’’ long before television and the telephone existed. Inquiry into trance mediumship, therefore, forms an interpretative key to understanding technical media, and vice versa.

The introduction lays out the primary argument and themes of the study, provides an orientation to religion and media, and defines the three central terms: religion, network, and disconnection. Fundamental promises affiliated networks with connection—friction-free technology, social unity, a utopian present, and perfect communication—and obscured the failures of networks to be or produce those things. Religion, while fueling those very promises, also participated in the disconnections that riddled telegraph networks: negotiating and occasioning technological breakdown, structuring social life on the violence of colonialism, investing in the impossibility of utopian futures, and fomenting the fundamental failures of communication. The final section provides an account of infrastructure to supplement theories of religion and networks.

This introductory chapter situates the book in relation to existing frameworks for the study of religion and technology across various disciplines and arenas of discussion. The introduction begins with a commentary on how the study of religion and technology can and should build upon recent scholarship in religion and media (which has been marked by a growing interest in the material and technological dimensions of religious practice), and in social studies of science and technology (where there has been a growing premium placed on the ‘supernatural’ or ‘transcendental’ qualities of modern techno-science). The introduction proceeds to assess the established literature on religion and technology, noting problematic tendencies to rely on naively instrumentalist conceptions of technology use, and also on a Christian-centered conception of religion as an immaterial, symbolic force, completely separate from its technological engagements. This critique sets the stage for the agenda pursued in the rest of the book, namely to reconceptualize the relationship between religion and technology, and to demonstrate the possibilities for new interpretation through the close reading of particular case studies, both within and outside the history of Euro-American Christianity.

Chapter 2 focuses on an advertising campaign in Greater Manchester—mounted on roadside billboards, bus stop shelters, tram cars, taxis, and even beer mats—through which the Bible Society hoped to convince the general public that the Bible is relevant to the cares and concerns of modern life. In this project a revelatory message was made secondary to a “cultural” one; it is in this chapter that the advocacy team’s invocation of the church/culture divide is most evident. The project shows us how secularity gets configured as part of a Christian project of engagement and renewal.

Chapter 5 examines how Buddhist lay practitioners seek to earn merit and social status among other practitioners through the creation, copying, and distribution of Buddhist-themed media. It describes in detail the types of materials the practitioners create and distribute and the different roles they take in this process. It also shows how the circulation of these materials fosters an imagined community of lay Buddhists in China as a whole and perpetuates discourses on the role of the miraculous in everyday life and the importance of moral reform that run counter to themes of secular progress in the mainstream media.