This Special Issue aims to provide an understanding of the contemporary relationship between religion, media and popular culture. It strives to refine the framework for interpreting religion in the broader context of the mediatization as a historical process of transformation in the society impacted by mass media, emergent media and artificial intelligence (Hjarvard, 2008; Krotz, 2009; Couldry & Hepp, 2013; Gomes, 2016 and 2017; Tudor & Bratosin, 2020, 2021), which plays both the role of mediator between elite culture and popular culture and of a transmission belt between the low and the high levels of culture (Fornäs, 2014). Mediatization also organizes and articulates the lives of religious “corporate” and individual actors to economic, political, and social processes and to mass culture. In this context, the articles submitted may address the following issues (non-exhaustive list):
- The way in which media seizes on the religious, inscribed in the different visions shared by cultures and societies on the relationship of contemporary religion with the processes of media influence of beliefs, action and religious symbols, transformations of religious authority and power, etc.
- Media transformations and mutations examined through the prism of the effects such as the sacralization of political leaders, football stars, ordinary people who have become saints, movie stars who have become idols, etc. (Eliade, 1987; Rothenbuhler and Coman, 2005; Stout, 2012).
- The contribution of media to the construction of the religious fact addressed through case studies of magazines, religious websites, media coverage of religious events, etc. (Bratosin, 2016; Tudor, 2020, 2021).
- The presence of organized religion in the media via churches, media coverage of religious events by the religious institutions, or the presence of religious elements in the popular culture media products as movies, films platforms, documentaries, etc. (Bratosin, 2020; Debray, 2000; Stout, 2012; Tudor, 2021).
