Mediating Faiths: Religion and Socio-cultural Change in the Twenty-first Century

This is a timely and essential study into a subject so curiously neglected by the social sciences in recent years. To those of us used to dealing with the currency of religion in the public sphere, this is fresh and challenging material. To those who are dozing along in the misconception that religion is an irritating irrelevance - here is your wake-up call. Michael Wakelin, Director of the Cambridge Coexist Project and Former Head of Religion and Ethics at the BBC, UK

Religion is living culture. It continues to play a role in shaping political ideologies, institutional practices, communities of interest, ways of life and social identities. Mediating Faiths brings together scholars working across a range of fields, including cultural studies, media, sociology, anthropology, cultural theory and religious studies, in order to facilitate greater understanding of recent transformations.

Contributors illustrate how religion continues to be responsive to the very latest social and cultural developments in the environments in which it exists. They raise fundamental questions concerning new media and religious expression, religious youth cultures, the links between spirituality, personal development and consumer culture, and contemporary intersections of religion, identity and politics. Together the chapters demonstrate how belief in the superempirical is negotiated relative to secular concerns in the twenty-first century.

Michael Bailey is Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. He has held visiting fellowships at Goldsmiths, University of London, the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (a collaboration between the Open University and the University of Manchester), the London School of Economics, Wolfson College and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge.
Guy Redden teaches cultural studies at the University of Sydney. He has previously lectured at Prince of Songkla University, Thailand and the University of Queensland, Australia, where he earned his PhD, and Lincoln University in the UK. He has published widely about the commodification of religion and alternative cultures. His articles include `The New Age: Towards a Market Model', Journal of Contemporary Religion, 20(2), 2005; and `The New Agents: Personal Transfiguration and Radical Privatisation in New Age Self-Help', Journal of Consumer Culture, 2(1), 2002. He is a former editor of M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture.