Page - 18 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/02

18 | Mirko Roth www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/2, 17–35 As we address the first questions, core issues concerning religious studies as an academic discipline are broached. We might wonder about the purpose of religious studies and how this purpose can be achieved. and we might ask, What is religion? the second questions take us into issues of modern teaching and its methods and limits, and also force us to consider whether and how un- derstanding the other is possible. additionally, using media in teaching religious studies moves us beyond the use of media per se into religious studies-specific reflection on how media can be used to mediate an already mediated phenomenon that more often than not is also grounded in a different social and cultural context. It is therefore necessary first to reflect on the first-order mediatisation process of religious traditions themselves, then to consider second-order mediatisation processes on the part of the religious scholar, and finally to examine the discrepancies and tension between these two levels. this approach will also help answer the questions raised above. My didactical hypothesis for how media might be used in the teaching of reli- gious studies to mediate religious facts from a religious studies perspective is as follows: media used in the first-order mediatisation of religion should as much as possible be permitted to “speak for themselves”, but in the teaching situa- tion – in a second-order mediatisation – must be provided with a critical cultural and religious context. one suggestion for how this necessarily critical approach could look and might work will be developed in this article. i further suggest that a religious studies teaching strategy might be designed such that the tensions inherent in the possibilities and limits of teaching religious studies as well as issues of first and second-order mediatisation can be resolved through the application of a concept termed here “competence acquisition”.1 teaching religious studies must be done in such a way that in the course of their studies students acquire the necessary competence to grasp and resolve these tensions for themselves, in the form of (a) the competence to learn critically (b) religious studies competence (c) intercultural competence and (d) media competence. in approaching my hypothesis as plausibly as possible, i will proceed as fol- lows: since unreflected preconceptions influence our attitudes and actions when we teach religious studies, i begin with a series of assumptions focus- ing on media and communication about what one purpose of religious studies might be and about what religion might be considered to be. these assump- tions are based on the contemporary aesthetic approach of a “material reli- 1 Within German-language discourse there is friction between educational theories concerning “com- petence acquisition” (Kompetenzerwerb) and education (Bildung) that cannot be rendered properly in English. The concepts of “competence acquisition” and “learning objectives” as used here partly comprise Bildung. Cf. further obst 2010.