My latest at Religion Dispatches: “Christian Radio, Muslim Radio…”

Snippets from my latest at Religion Dispatches.

Religion Dispatches – Christian Radio, Muslim Radio…

I spoke today to somebody in South Africa who was preparing to make umrah, or “minor” pilgrimage to Mecca, and was intrigued to discover that she’d won the tickets by calling into her local radio station. I find fascinating how this scenario mixes two worlds, at least from an American perspective.

[…]

For me, much of contemporary Christian radio is philosophically marred by arid binary thinking, kneejerk scripturalism, and cold individualism camouflaged with pieties about personal responsibility as traditional spirituality.

This state of affairs in Christian radio is ironically reminiscent of how Salafi media outlets and websites dominated the early years of the Islamic Internet […]

Which reminds me: where are the mainline Protestant and Catholic radio shows? To turn the post-9/11 tables on American Christians, why don’t non-evangelicals “speak up” more in the media to show what Christianity really is?