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Religion and Prime Time Television. Edited by Michael Suman. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997. xiii + 174 pp.
Academic books on religion and the media are sufficiently rare that, almost without regard to quality, the appearance of one becomes an event to be remarked upon. Occasionally, as when one of Stewart Hoover's books reaches our shelves, the event is indeed noteworthy. Hoover brings to his research (inspired as it is in the socialscientific dimension by James Carey's tutelage) sufficient echoes of a childhood deeply immersed in American Bible-Belt evangelism to make of him an imaginatively comprehending and respectful scholar in this field. Quite simply, he properly understands religion as a thing more primal than other social phenomena.(f.1)
More frequently the case, as emeritus editor of the Journal, Eugene Tate (himself both a sociologist and an ordained Methodist minister) expressed it in recent conversation with this writer, "matters of spirit generally remain incomprehensible to the social-scientific mind." And so it is, for the most part, with this new contribution to the literature on religion in the mass-mediated society.
Religion and Prime Time Television is edited by Michael Suman, and consists (with two exceptions) of a gathering of speech transcripts, papers, and articles at a conference in 1995 at UCLA.(f.2) There is an opening section subtitled "Conference Speeches by Religious Figures," immediately followed by a section "Articles by Religious Leaders"--seven pieces altogether. The rationale creating separate categories is obscure, as these are mostly quite informal bits of work, and there seems little to distinguish between article and speech transcript.
John Patrick Foley's appreciative remembrance of the Waltons, and his confessed sense of identification with John-Boy is rather typical of the fare on offer here. It may provide pleasing sentiment for those who remember the series with nostalgia, but the archbishop hardly reaches, as one might expect of him, to sophisticated description or analysis...