From movies to streaming video, we live in a numbing age of visual sermons...

[Michie]

Glowing icons on digital screens are everywhere, almost all the time, which only makes them more powerful

This is not a journal article that dates back to my Communicator on Culture days at Denver Seminary. This is an article from early in my life as an Orthodox Christian, when I was asked — by the publishing team with the Antiochian Christian Archdiocese — to explain to clergy and laypeople what I learned from teaching mass-communication subjects in a seminary.

Yes, once again, lots of people hear, “Popular culture apologetics class at a seminary” and immediately think,” Oh! He’s going to teach preachers how to use movie clips to illustrate their sermons.”

Nope, that’s never been one of my goals. Try to imagine video display screens hanging in Orthodox churches. Not gonna happen (and thank God for that).

What we have here is an essay about what I believe is the religious ROLE that mass media — even advertising — play in the lives of millions and millions of Americans. Here’s a short version of what I’m talking about, condensed into one paragraph from a 2001 interview that I did with the Journal of Homiletics (“homiletics is the art of preaching and/or writing sermons”). The focus here is on advertising theory:

… Half the ads on television today make no sense whatsoever in a linear fashion in terms of having anything remotely to do with the product. They're getting across an attitude, a mood. They're asking, "Do you want to be the kind of person who uses this product?" One ad theorist has said that "they presume the product has a soul." If you think as a sacramental Christian, people are taking communion at the mall. They are consuming the product, the soul of the product, to become the essence of the product. It's a liturgical experience. They're taking communion at the mall! They are what they eat, which is the essence of the ancient church's definition of communion.

Like I said, that was in 2001. The essay that I want to share with you — in audio and text form — is from roughly that same time and called “The liturgy of mass media.” It ran in Again magazine, which for years was the print flagship of Ancient Faith Publishing.

Continued below.

Are Americans still taking Communion at shopping malls?

Glowing icons on digital screens are everywhere, almost all the time, which only makes them more powerful

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