Minority Churches as Media Settlers

This book aims to answer questions around how minority Christian Churches in the UK and Poland - the Seventh-day Adventist Church and the Orthodox Churches - use their own media to position themselves in their social, religious, and political environments.

How do minority Christian churches adapt to and negotiate with the changes brought about by deep mediatization? How do they use their media to present themselves to their followers and the general public? This book aims to answer these questions by investigating how minority organizations of two different Christian traditions in the UK and Poland - the Seventh-day Adventist Church and the Orthodox Churches - use their own media to position themselves in their social, religious, and political environments.

Based on the analyses of media practices, media content, and interview material, the study develops the new concept of media settlers, which pertains to religious organizations that use their media to fulfill their own aims: expand, assert their authority, and maintain their communities. They do so through five key media practices, which can be defined as strategies: acknowledgment, authorization, omission, replication of content, and mass-mediatization of digital media.

This book is of particular interest to scholars of religion and mediatization, mainly sociologists, graduate students, and qualitative researchers working with discourse analysis. It is an insightful read for anyone interested in the Seventh-day Adventist and Orthodox Churches nowadays.

Autorentext

Dorota Hall is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw.

Marta Köodziejska is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw, Poland.

Kerstin Radde-Antweiler is a Professor of Religious Studies and deputy spokesperson of the ZeMKI at the University of Bremen, Germany.

Inhalt

Introduction 1. Media Settlers: corporate actors' shaping of media 2. Going with the trends: adapting to deep mediatization 3. Shaping the media: negotiating the trends of deep mediatization 4. United in narratives: integrating the church community 5. Being a part of this world: narrative alignment with society 6. Being different: narrative engagement with power dynamics Conclusion. Index