THEO5933
Media, Popular Culture and Christianity
3 Units
This course is a critical exploration of the intricate relationships between popular media culture and Christianity. While popular culture and the media have long become a daily reality for many in the world, these have seldom been taken seriously by theologians and scholars of religion. Also, the relationship between popular media and religion (including Christianity) is often overlooked in academic studies until relatively recent time. We shall re-examine various manifestations of popular culture from Christian theological perspectives, and also probes into the subtle interrelatedness between media culture and Christianity as an organized religion. As its wider academic context, this course engages with the interdisciplinary field of media, religion, and culture (MRC) which has been under vigorous development since the mid-1990s; as its immediate socio-cultural-religious context of discussions, it attends particularly to the Chinese language popular media and Chinese Christianity in Hong Kong.