Seeing Through the Media: A Religious View of Communication and Cultural Analysis

Rating:
Summary: Christianity and Cultural Studies
Review: In my experience, I have found very few self-avowed Christian writers who interact with cultural studies theory using its terminology and concepts. Warren attempts this in his text and for the most part, I believe he succeeds. He leaps off from Stuart Hall's notions about commodities, production, and hegemony to challenge religious people to consider how they interact with their culture. Although the title would suggest that Warren's analysis is limited to media, he also deals with the related areas of image interpretation and advertising to move people to think about the hegemonic structures of culture in which they live.
The only shortfall of the book was the chapter on metaphor. Although this is an important topic in and of itself, I didn't think that it fit with the overall subject matter of Warren's text.

Rating:
Summary: Christianity and Cultural Studies
Review: In my experience, I have found very few self-avowed Christian writers who interact with cultural studies theory using its terminology and concepts. Warren attempts this in his text and for the most part, I believe he succeeds. He leaps off from Stuart Hall's notions about commodities, production, and hegemony to challenge religious people to consider how they interact with their culture. Although the title would suggest that Warren's analysis is limited to media, he also deals with the related areas of image interpretation and advertising to move people to think about the hegemonic structures of culture in which they live.
The only shortfall of the book was the chapter on metaphor. Although this is an important topic in and of itself, I didn't think that it fit with the overall subject matter of Warren's text.