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Orthodox by Design, a groundbreaking exploration of religion and media, examines ArtScroll, the world's largest Orthodox Jewish publishing house, purveyor of handsomely designed editions of sacred texts and a major cultural force in contemporary Jewish public life. In the first in-depth study of the ArtScroll revolution, Jeremy Stolow traces the ubiquity of ArtScroll books in local retail markets, synagogues, libraries, and the lives of ordinary users. Synthesizing field research conducted in three local Jewish scenes where ArtScroll books have had an impact-Toronto, London, and New York-along with close readings of key ArtScroll texts, promotional materials, and the Jewish blogosphere, he shows how the use of these books reflects a broader cultural shift in the authority and public influence of Orthodox Judaism. Playing with the concept of design, Stolow's study also outlines a fresh theoretical approach to print culture and illuminates how evolving technologies, material forms, and styles of mediated communication contribute to new patterns of religious identification, practice, and power. Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in the scholarship category, Jewish Book Council

The essays in this volume explore how two domains of human experience and action--religion and technology--are implicated in each other. Contrary to commonsense understandings of both religion (as an \"otherworldly\" orientation) and technology (as the name for tools, techniques, and expert knowledges oriented to \"this\" world), the contributors to this volume challenge the grounds on which this division has been erected in the first place. What sorts of things come to light when one allows religion and technology to mingle freely? In an effort to answer that question, Deus in Machina embarks upon an interdisciplinary voyage across diverse traditions and contexts where religion and technology meet: from the design of clocks in medieval Christian Europe, to the healing power of prayer in premodern Buddhist Japan, to 19th-century Spiritualist devices for communicating with the dead, to Islamic debates about kidney dialysis in contemporary Egypt, to the work of disability activists using documentary film to reimagine Jewish kinship, to the representation of Haitian Vodou on the Internet, among other case studies. Combining rich historical and ethnographic detail with extended theoretical reflection, Deus in Machina outlines new directions for the study of religion and/as technology that will resonate across the human sciences, including religious studies, science and technology studies, communication studies, history, anthropology, and philosophy.

The essays in this volume explore how two domains of human experience and action-religion and technology-are implicated in each other. Contrary to commonsense understandings of both religion (as an \"otherworldly\" orientation) and technology (as the name for tools, techniques, and expert knowledges oriented to \"this\" world), the contributors to this volume challenge the grounds on which this division has been erected in the first place. What sorts of things come to light when one allows religion and technology to mingle freely? In an effort to answer that question, Deus in Machina embarks upon an interdisciplinary voyage across diverse traditions and contexts where religion and technology meet: from the design of clocks in medieval Christian Europe, to the healing power of prayer in premodern Buddhist Japan, to 19th-century Spiritualist devices for communicating with the dead, to Islamic debates about kidney dialysis in contemporary Egypt, to the work of disability activists using documentary film to reimagine Jewish kinship, to the representation of Haitian Vodou on the Internet, among other case studies. Combining rich historical and ethnographic detail with extended theoretical reflection, Deus in Machina outlines new directions for the study of religion and/as technology that will resonate across the human sciences, including religious studies, science and technology studies, communication studies, history, anthropology, and philosophy.

In Paris, starting in March 1909, Julien Ochorowicz, codirector of the Institut General Psychologique de Paris, organized a series of seances to be conducted with Stanislava Tomczyk, a medium whom Ochorowicz had \"discovered\" in Poland and had brought to Paris for further study. Tomczyk had already gained a reputation for her telekinetic abilities to levitate small objects, to stop the movement of clocks, and to influence the outcome of a spinning roulette wheel, among other powers. The medium's abilities were attributed to Little Stasia, a control spirit who communicated with and through Tomczyk by means of alphabetic rapping, automatic writing, and direct speech during the medium's somnambulant states. Here, Stolow suggests that they have good reasons to hold in check their most instinctive assumptions about the authenticity of Ochorowicz's photographic evidence of the spirit world.

In Paris, starting in March 1909, Julien Ochorowicz, codirector of the Institut General Psychologique de Paris, organized a series of seances to be conducted with Stanislava Tomczyk, a medium whom Ochorowicz had discovered in Poland and had brought to Paris for further study. Tomczyk had already gained a reputation for her telekinetic abilities to levitate small objects, to stop the movement of clocks, and to influence the outcome of a spinning roulette wheel, among other powers. The medium's abilities were attributed to Little Stasia, a control spirit who communicated with and through Tomczyk by means of alphabetic rapping, automatic writing, and direct speech during the medium's somnambulant states. Here, Stolow suggests that they have good reasons to hold in check their most instinctive assumptions about the authenticity of Ochorowicz's photographic evidence of the spirit world. (Author abstract)

To unearth the reasons why the animating force of [Bill] 60 might remain in play within Québec politics, even in the wake of the recent election, we need to examine more closely one of the key planks of the proposed charter, namely its proposal to draw a line between \"ostentatious\" and \"non-ostentatious\" religious signs, and their respective degrees of permissibility within the public sector workplace. \"From this point on,\" it was stated in one document explaining the government's legislative intention, \"those working for the state must demonstrate their religious neutrality, not only in their behaviour but also in their appearance\" (Government of Quebec, 2013, p. 4, my translation). To ensure this \"appearance of religious neutrality,\" the proposed Bill 60 would specifically proscribe the wearing of religious signs that were deemed to be \"easily visible\" and that possessed the power to \"draw attention\" to themselves (ayant un caractère démonstratif). The language adopted here of visibility and attention-condensed in the key category, that of \"signes ostentatoires\"-was embedded in a larger conversation concerning the place of religion in modem nation-states, as emphasized by none other than then-Premiere Pauline Marois, when, during one media scrum, she defended her government's initiative as conforming to \"a well-known international standard.\" No doubt, one of the most important precedents being invoked here was that of France, which in 2003 tasked the Stasi Commission to help \"defend secularism\" within the French public school system through the codification of acceptable legal limits for the wearing of religious attire (Government of France, 2003). In this context, the Québec initiative offered a variation of what has already become a familiar international theme that conceives secularism and its threats in specifically visual terms. The word \"ostentation,\" after all, assumes an intentionality on the part of the wearer to be noticed: more precisely, to be noticed in an excessive, provocative manner. In this framework, undesirable religious affiliations and modes of public presentation can be treated as forms of visible pollution (cf. [Gonzalez], 2015).

At least so far as visual culture is concerned, we might well recall here how religious actors have long depended upon diverse material, technical, and bodily means of negotiating between \"the visible\" and \"the invisible\" in order to articulate versions of what David Morgan calls \"visual piety\" (Morgan, 1998; cf. [Karim], 2015, pp. 11-28). On the one hand, we can invoke the well-known (if greatly exaggerated) suspicion of \"idols\" and \"graven images\" in Jewish, Islamic, and Protestant Christian traditions that continues to inform modern-day anxieties about the power of images to seduce and to deceive, and that legitimize iconoclastic projects to sequester, censor, or destroy images in such diverse contexts as religious ritual, public art, or scientific laboratory life (Ellenbogen & Tugendhaft, 20ü; Latour & Weibel, 2002). On the other hand, we might invoke legacies of investment in the proliferation and adoration of images, such as in the rich visual economy of Catholic saint veneration, or in the reverential technique of \"seeing\" a divine power and thereby receiving its grace that is central to Hindu ritual practice as well as the effusion of Hindu religious iconography in public life, as taken up by [Mann]'s article in this issue (cf. Jain, 2007; Rajagopal, 2001). These and other examples alert us to the need, not only to document and understand the ways religion has become (newly) visible in public life, but also to identify the specific terms on which that visibility is imagined, negotiated, processed, and circulated by religious actors themselves. Yet the enduring story of religion's decline remains part of the background noise of any examination of public religion. Indeed, what underlies this persistent assumption that religion will become, should become, or already has become invisible in the modem public sphere? One possible genealogy can be traced back to Harbermas' Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989), which arguably minimized the role of religion in public life, positing it as a tool of the ruling class and as a remnant of pre-Enlightenment irrationality that would inevitably disappear with the adoption of \"communicative rationality\"-although, we hasten to add, Habermas himself has more recently acknowledged the limitations of his original account of the fate of religion in modernity (Habermas, 2011). However, at the root of both Habermas' original work and in his own addendum, one still finds an enduring attachment to a particular conception of the secular nation-state and its presumed role in fostering the conditions of possibility for a truly universal public sphere. While \"religion\" may make productive interventions in the public sphere, it can only do so if it adopts a universal language of the secular. Of course, scholars such as Nancy Fraser (1992) have challenged Habermas' notion of a universal public sphere, and work on counterpublics has likewise proposed that the Habermasian model needs to be replaced by one that makes room for a plurality of public spheres (Warner, 2002). Nonetheless, the status of \"the secular\" as a constitutional element for the creation and healthy survival of modem public spheres is not easily dismissed. As Craig Calhoun (2011) observes, the \"tacit understanding of citizenship in the modem West has been secular\" (p. 75), despite the long-standing ways religious actors, institutions, and patterns of adherence have made their presence felt in multiple layers of public discourse.

Media is a kind of gatekeeper, connecting disparate entities and shielding them from one another at the same time.When we speak of media, we often refer to those entities themselves--to persons, organizations, artifacts, signals, and inscriptions--referencing directors, artists, newspapers, films, iPhones, paper, ink, notes, beats, color, and.