Article:

The Face of the Other (Faith) as a Threat: How Images Shape Our Perception

According to Emmanuel Lévinas, the face of the other is the starting point of ethics. The following article therefore examines in which form of media representation we Christians meet with the other or more precisely with “the faith of the other”. Across the photo reporting of migration, war and terror, it will be shown that de-subjectifying images dominate and that the face of the other is absent. The same applies to religious websites and social media, where biblical quotations and idyllic landscape images predominate and people – or people’s faces – who could be a challenge to one's own faith hardly appear. This affects the perception of ‘the own’ and ‘the foreign’, and it does so in an even more negative way as the competence to interpret images correctly is not particularly well-developed in most people.