Mark Earls has a nice post on (the people formerly known as) the audience. The best part, for me, was this warning of marketeers being in collusion with Calvinism. Talk about strange bedfellows.
Again in Northern Europe we’ve disassociated the body from the mind/spirit in thinking about audiences: the priest/marketer sends messages but the audience just receives intellectually or at least without moving. The medieval church worked really hard to extirpate dancing from religious celebrations (as well as secular ones) for similar reasons that later Calvinists (and even later missionaries to the 3rd World) did: they all saw the energy created by physical, collective worship as unpredictable, dangerous (and plain ungodly-in-the-sense-they-understood-it…).
