Religious Speech

The Ineffable Nature of Religious Communication in the Information Age

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2352183
AutoresB Turner (0000-0001-6378-7144, Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore, autor de correspondencia)
Año2008
Volumen25
Número7-8
Páginas219-235
Fecha de publicación2008-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaTheory Culture & Society (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0263-2764 • E-ISSN: 1460-3616
EditorialSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0263276408097804
OpenAlexW2102248567
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas5
Referencias citadas33

In recent years, sociologists have been much concerned with the nature of communication and its consequences, but little attention, even in the sociology of religion, has been given to the idea of communication between human society and other worlds. Divine communication is sociologically interesting as a communication puzzle: authentic religious communication tends to be ineffable and hence it requires considerable intellectual work by experts to translate it into the effable domain. The ineffability of religious inspiration is associated with hierarchical structures in societies with high illiteracy, because the untutored laity cannot readily interpret such messages expertly. The arrival of an information society and extensive literacy presupposes some degree of democratization and in particular an emphasis on - to conjure up a word strangely missing from modern English - effability. This transition from the hierarchical/ineffable to the horizontal/ effable implies a profound change in systems of authority in society and hence a transformation of the relationships between formal and popular religion

Democratization · Epistemology · Functional illiteracy · Linguistics · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Transition (genetics · Law · Media, Religion, Digital Communication · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology