Kirjahaku

Imagine yourself as a house under construction. What does it mean to develop as a follower of Jesus? Jesus wants to remake us, from the ground up, to reconstruct us so that we become the people he had in mind. Christians are built on his firm foundation. But if we barely allow Jesus through the front door, it is no surprise that we are left wondering whether this really is as good as it gets. Neil O'Boyle shows us what it means to open ourselves up, so that the light of Christ shines into the dark nooks and exposes the sagging rafters. In the living room, what are we watching? In the bathroom, do we take care of ourselves? In the privacy of our bedroom, what are we like? In the dining room, what are our guests doing? In the garden, will there be fruit? In the garden shed, what tools has Jesus given us? Neil is National Director for British Youth for Christ. He has served as a missionary in Cyprus, the Arabian Gulf, Thailand and America. He is passionate about evangelism and has a wealth of experience as a leader and team builder. He and his wife Joy have four children.

This book takes a human-centred and concept-led journey through communication theory and is aimed primarily at those who are new to communication studies. Each chapter uses a single concept – actors, narrators, members, performers, influencers, and produsers – to explore key ideas, theories, and thinkers. The six core concepts offer unique, though related, ways of thinking about “flesh and blood” human communicators in a world that is now fundamentally intertwined with media. Each chapter includes a mix of early and recent studies to enable readers to historically locate concepts and trace their evolution. Overall, the book aims to foster an appreciation of theory in readers, cultivate their theoretical sensitivity, and provide them with lots of “real world” examples to help them better understand how theories apply to everyday life.

Advertisements are often viewed as indices of cultural change, just as the advertising industry is often imagined as innovative and transformative. Advancing from an alternative position, which borrows much from practice-based research, this book instead highlights the routinisation of practices and representations in advertising. Drawing extensively from his own study, the author uses Irishness to investigate the relationship between cultural symbolism in advertising and the cultural vocabularies of advertising practitioners. While globalisation and immigration to Ireland have putatively unhinged taken-for-granted understandings of Irish identity, the author argues that representations of Ireland and Irishness in the global context continue to draw from a stock of particularisms and that advertising practitioners continue to operate with largely essentialist understandings of culture and identity. As the first of its kind in Ireland, this book makes a case for renewed attention to advertising by academic scholars and promotes the benefits of interdisciplinary research.