The Center for Religion and Media at New York University began its life as one of ten Centers of Excellence funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts from 2003–2007. Today, with an endowment from NYU, we continue to produce media projects and stimulate research and public conversations in the interdisciplinary study of religion, especially at the nexus of religion and social life. This commitment is threefold: first, to developing interdisciplinary, cross-cultural knowledge of how religious practices and ideas are shaped and spread through a variety of media. Second, we are interested in how media themselves function as commodified forms of entertainment and digital connection to provide communal and personal identities in ways usually associated with religion. And finally, as the Center provides a space for scholarly endeavor and a stage for public educational events, it also creates its own electronic interface with scholars, journalists, and the public through its innovative and award-winning online magazine, The Revealer: A Review of Religion and Media. While this project was conceived before September 11, that event and its aftermath dramatized the need for a better public understanding of religious ideas and practices through a variety of media.
The Center is a joint project of the Department of Religious Studies and the Center for Media, Culture, and History. Angela Zito and Faye Ginsburg co-founded the Center and serve as its co-directors. Brett Krutzsch is the Editor of the Center’s award-wining online magazine, The Revealer.
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The Pew Years, 2003-2007:
The Center officially started in May 2003. We inaugurated ourselves with a collaboration in the summer of 2003 with Diana Taylor and the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at NYU in hosting an international “encuentro” on Spectacles of Religiosity: Religious Mediation in the Americas.
Each year from 2003-2007 saw us take on a specific theme, hosting several Working Groups and planning public events that illuminated its issues:
For 2003-2004, the annual theme was Confession, Testimony, Witnessing. In May 2004 we hosted a three-day interdisciplinary conference: “Religious Witness: the Intimate, the Everyday, and the World”.
For 2004–2005, the annual theme was Religious Experience: Memory, Media, Marketing. In May 2005, we presented, along with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, The Museum of Modern Art’s First Nations/First Features: A Showcase of World Indigenous Film and Media.
For 2005–2006, as we started the year themed Religion, Media, and Body Politics, we were faced with the disastrous human response to the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. We immediately began planning a May 2006 conference called “Body Counts/Bodies Count”.
For 2006–2007, the theme was Secularization, Media and the Globalization of Religion. We explored various media through which challenges to secularism have been mounted, pursued, and performed, and how they acquired social weight.
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2008-2019:
Since 2008, the Center for Religion and Media continued to work closely with our sister center at NYU–the Center for Media, Culture, and History–on the place of religious life in the politics of culture and change. In particular, we have turned to examining Digital Religion with two projects funded by the Henry R. Luce Foundation, Digital Religion: Knowledge, Politics and Practice, (September 2011- August 2013) and Religious Stakes in Digital Times: Scholars and Journalists in conversation (2015-2019). During this time we transformed The Revealer into a monthly online magazine and hosted a series of postdoctoral fellows for one-year appointments.
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2019-Today:
The Center for Religion and Media’s central project is the award-winning online magazine The Revealer, published ten times a year. The magazine publishes a mix of articles by scholars, journalists, and freelance writers about religion’s place in politics, society, and culture. In addition to regularly monthly issues, The Revealer also publishes one special issue a year. Special issues have included “Religion and Sex Abuse,” “Trans Lives and Religion” and “Religion and Reproductive Rights.”
Since 2020 The Revealer has received more than eight awards, both national and international, for the articles and issues we have published.
In March 2020, the Center launched the Revealer podcast as our newest media platform to improve public discussions about religion. The Center publishes eleven episodes a year. Episode topics have included “Religion in the CIA,” “Jewish Comedy,” “The FBI and White Christian Nationalism,” and “Faith-Based Prison in the U.S.” In 2021, the Religion News Association named the Revealer podcast a finalist for best religion podcast.
The Center also hosts two-three public events each semester, both in-person and virtual, that address various aspects of religion and society.
In 2021 and 2023, the Religion News Association, the largest professional organization for religion journalism in the United States, awarded The Revealer with the 1st-place prize in “Excellence in Magazine Overall Religion Coverage,” its highest award for a print or online magazine.