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In this work, Anderson Blanton illuminates how prayer, faith, and healing are intertwined with technologies of sound reproduction and material culture in the charismatic Christian worship of southern Appalachia. From the radios used to broadcast prayer to the curative faith cloths circulated through the postal system, material objects known as spirit-matter have become essential since the 1940s, Blanton argues, to the Pentecostal community's understanding and performances of faith. Hittin' the Prayer Bones draws on Blanton's extensive site visits with church congregations, radio preachers and their listeners inside and outside the broadcasting studios, and more than thirty years of recorded charismatic worship made available to him by a small Christian radio station. In documenting the transformation and consecration of everyday objects through performances of communal worship, healing prayer, and chanted preaching, Blanton frames his ethnographic research in the historiography of faith healing and prayer, as well as theoretical models of materiality and transcendence. At the same time, his work affectingly conveys the feelings of horror, healing, and humor that are unleashed in practitioners as they experience, in their own words, the sacred, healing presence of the Holy Ghost.

This volume explores the interferences of trance mediums and new technical media to add a new perspective to the ongoing debates on the “renaissance of the religious” which has been challenging narratives of modernity and its disenchantment during the last two decades. However, in these discussions the “orgiastic” or enthusiastic qualities of religiosity have been largely neglected, despite the significant increase of the use of techniques of trance and possession that can be stated on a global level. Likewise, in research on religion and media only little attention has been paid to the fact that the rise of mediumship and spirit possession is closely linked to the advance of new media of communication – both analogues and digital. To close this gap this innovative and unprecedented publication offers a wide range of recent ethnographic studies in the fields of media anthropology as well as explorations in media studies and the anthropology of religion, which provide a broad, international, comparative perspective. Based on extensive scholarship the volume includes studies on local spiritual and media practices as varied as Thailand, Korea, India, Morocco, Mali, Tanzania and Germany. The editors aim to develop a new conceptual framework for ongoing work on religion and media, at the crossroads between anthropology, religious studies, and media studies.

Drawing upon a wide range of historical and ethnographic examples, this book approaches the study of religion and technology from an interdisciplinary perspective, synthesizing recent work in the anthropology and history of religion, media studies, and science and technology studies. The book comprises eleven original case studies plus an introduction that critically assesses the existing literature on religion and technology, and suggests future paths of scholarly inquiry. Discussions range across different religious traditions (including Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Spiritualism, Buddhism, and Vodou) in different regions of the world (including Western Europe, United States, Ghana, Brazil, and Japan), and with regard to an array of technologies and technological procedures (including clocks and other timekeeping devices, magically empowered cables, belts, and talismans, kidney dialysis machines, and Internet-mediated commercial transactions). The fundamental operating premise of the book is that religion and technology do not refer to two mutually exclusive realms of knowledge, practice, and experience, but rather to a continuum of relationships between and among diverse material and immaterial entities, forces, and actors. Each chapter offers a concrete case study, attending to the things that lie “in between” religion and technology as they are commonly divided, and on that basis provides new analytical insight into the very construction of these categories in scholarly as well as non-academic discourses.

The British and Foreign Bible Society is one of the most illustrious Christian charities in the United Kingdom. Founded by evangelicals in the early nineteenth century and inspired by developments in printing technology at the time, its goal has always been nothing less than making Bibles universally available. Over the past several decades, though, the Bible Society has faced a radically different world, especially in its domestic work in England. Where the society once had a grateful and engaged reading public, it now faces apathy—even antipathy—for its cause. These days, it seems, no one in England wants a Bible. And no one wants other people telling them that they should: religion is supposed to be a private matter. The culture is secular. Undeterred, staff at the society have gone about trying to spark a renewed interest in the Word of God. They’ve turned away from publishing and toward publicity to “make the Bible heard.” God’s Agents is a study of how religion goes public in today’s world. Based on over three years of anthropological research, Matthew Engelke traces how a small group of socially committed Christians tackle the challenge of publicity within (what they understand to be) a largely secular culture. In the process of telling their story, Engelke offers an insightful new way to think about the relationships between secular and religious formations more generally. More than the resurgence of “public religion,” what we’re witnessing today are the dynamics of religious publicity.