Faith Online

Presents findings from a survey conducted in November and December 2003, to document the use of the Internet for spiritual or religious purposes

The 700 Club as Religion and as Television: A Study of Reasons and Effects

There has been a great deal of public debate recently over the phenomenon known as the Electronic Church. This label has come to be attached to a rather large group of religious television broadcasters who syndicate programming nationally and who pay for their use of this expensive medium through commercial-like appeals for funds from viewers. These broadcasters have come to public attention and scientific scrutiny recently due to their prominence in programming schedules nationwide (a function of technological and Federal policy developments) and to their presumed involvment in right of center politics

Religion and the Media in the 21st Century

The relationship between pop music and the urbanspace gives rise to a dialectic which affects both the definitionof music genres and the social concept of the spatialityof major cities. In this article we examine therepresentation of different places in Madrid in differentvideo clips, analyzing their discursive meaning andtheir articulation of identity, related to the values associatedwith certain artists and repertories; that is to say,the configuration of the urban ethos through its representationin musical production

Mídia e religião: premissas e implicações para os campos acadêmico e midiático

Mídia e religião: premissas e implicações para os campos acadêmico e midiático

Residual and Resurgent Protestantism in the American Media (and Political) Imaginary

This essay seeks to introduce more substantive attention to religion into the field of media studies. It argues that religion persists in culture and politics, as demonstrated by political upheavals in the North Atlantic West, and that media scholarship lacks critical theoretical and conceptual resources to address that fact. The essay calls for careful historicism and, as a heuristic, interrogates American Protestantism as a cultural, political, and media project. It references emerging scholarships to suggest ways that Protestantism is expressed as a politics in relation to the public and domestic spheres

Mother to offspring transmission of chronic wasting disease in Reeves' Muntjac deer

The horizontal transmission of prion diseases has been well characterized in bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), chronic wasting disease (CWD) of deer and elk and scrapie of sheep, and has been regarded as the primary mode of transmission. Few studies have monitored the possibility of vertical transmission occurring within an infected mother during pregnancy. To study the potential for and pathway of vertical transmission of CWD in the native cervid species, we used a small cervid model-the polyestrous breeding, indoor maintainable, Reeves' muntjac deer-and determined that the susceptibility and pathogenesis of CWD in these deer reproduce that in native mule and white-tailed deer. Moreover, we demonstrate here that CWD prions are transmitted from doe to fawn. Maternal CWD infection also appears to result in lower percentage of live birth offspring. In addition, evolving evidence from protein misfolding cyclic amplification (PMCA) assays on fetal tissues suggest that covert prion infection occurs in utero. Overall, our findings demonstrate that transmission of prions from mother to offspring can occur, and may be underestimated for all prion diseases

Feline leukaemia virus: half a century since its discovery

In the early 1960s, Professor William (Bill) F.H. Jarrett was presented with a timeGÇôspace cluster of cats with lymphoma identified by a local veterinary practitioner, Harry Pfaff, and carried out experiments to find if the condition might be caused by a virus, similar to lymphomas noted previously in poultry and mice. In 1964, the transmission of lymphoma in cats and the presence of virus-like particles that resembled GÇÿthe virus of murine leukaemiasGÇÖ in the induced tumours were reported in Nature. These seminal studies initiated research on feline leukaemia virus (FeLV) and launched the field of feline retrovirology. This review article considers the way in which some of the key early observations made by Bill Jarrett and his coworkers have developed in subsequent years and discusses progress that has been made in the field since FeLV was first discovered