Ritual, Media, and Conflict

Description: Rituals can provoke or escalate conflict, but they can also mediate it and although conflict is a normal aspect of human life, mass media technologies are changing the dynamics of conflict and shaping strategies for deploying rituals. This collection of essays emerged from a two-year project based on collaboration between the Faculty of Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and the Ritual Dynamics Collaborative Research Center at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. An interdisciplinary team of twenty-four scholars locates, describes, and explores cases in which media-driven rituals or ritually saturated media instigate, disseminate, or escalate conflict. Each multi-authored chapter is built around global and local examples of ritualized, mediatized conflict. The book's central question is: "When ritual and media interact (either by the mediatizing of ritual or by the ritualizing of media), how do the patterns of conflict change?"

Review Quotes: "Scholars of religion will be well served by this thought-provoking volume, no matter how much experience they have with these issues. The wide ranging and engaging case studies provide ample insights into what will likely be the next chapter in religious practice. Readers will come away with curiosity piqued, ready to reflect more on the interplay of ritual, media, and conflict." --Journal of the American Academy of Religion