Religion and Performance: in “media” res

Abstract

“In medias res” is a literary term that, in Latin, means to begin a narration in the midst of the action. The reader or viewer enters a created world as if it had always existed. Opening the door in the middle of the narrative exposes a world with a history heretofor unperceived, but no less active or affective than one’s own. This is the power of the fictive: to introduce something entirely new while at the same time creating the effect that it had been there all along. The two articles in this second issue of Performance, Religion, and Spirituality deal with very different forms of media: contemporary video games and the silent cinema musical accompaniment of the early twentieth century. In this issue, I invite readers to consider the implications of regarding religion as something communicated through various media, but also as a form of media itself. What might the term “religious media” mean, beyond the idea that media can be religiously informed or may attempt to communicate a religious message? Religion and Media is already a robust academic subfield (see Hosseini 2008 for a survey of approaches to media in religious studies), to which I hope our issue can contribute with its specific focus on performing and performance. This editorial will delve into scholarly as well as personal reflection in order to consider media as carriers of meaning on several levels: individual, social, and cosmic.