About Faith in Technology: Televangelism and the Mediation of Immediate Experience
| Authors | Denson, Shane |
|---|---|
| Date | 2011 |
| Publication | Phenomenology & Practice |
| Vol / Pages | Vol. 5 No. 2 pp. 93-119 |
| DOI | 10.29173/pandpr19847 |
| URL | https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/pandpr/index.php/pandpr/article/view/19847 |
| Language | en |
Type: Journal Article
Abstract
This paper seeks to illuminate the experiential structures implied in the viewing of televangelistic programming – with particular focus on programming of the charismatic faith-healing variety that culminates in the televangelist’s appeal to viewers to “touch the screen” and consummate a communion that transcends the separation implied by the televisual medium. By way of a “techno-phenomenological” analysis of this marginal media scenario, faith-healing televangelism is shown to involve experiential paradoxes that are tied to processes of social marginalization as well. Thus, it is argued, faith-healing televangelism functions as a call to viewers to mount a head-on confrontation with the technological infrastructure of secular modernity and thereby to effect a specifically material negotiation of evangelical culture’s precarious balancing act between an entrenchment in and a self-marginalization from the secular mainstream.