Frequencies at the AAR

by Kathryn Lofton

Please consider joining us this upcoming Sunday for an additional meeting at the American Academy of Religion (additional meeting means we aren't in the official book, yet are, like spirituality itself, haunting the event). Click on the poster below for more details.


If you haven't had a chance to check out Frequencies lately, be sure to check it out; we're on entry 53/100. We've had fantastic contributions from many fabulous scholars of American religions such as Courtney Bender, Julie Byrne, John Corrigan, Finbarr Curtis, Joshua Dubler, Gary Laderman, Sally Promey, Leigh Eric Schmidt, Judith Weisenfeld, and Diane Winston. This is just a sampler of the strange and delightful replies John Modern and I received to this prompt. We welcome all feedback -- online or in San Francisco!

p.s. If you're feeling a bit like today is a slow-news day, consider this: the site of the first celebrity wedding in America may have been found. I just hope this doesn't crowd Kim-and-Kris out of their coverage.

God Groups and Facebook Faith

Darren Grem

Yesterday, The New York Times posted on "Room for Debate" about "The First Church of Facebook." Here's the intro:

Nearly a third of Facebook users in the U.S. now list a religion in their profile, and they are highly engaged with religious pages — commenting, “liking,” socializing. Many religious people celebrate this new medium for outreach, but early this year Pope Benedict XVI issued a warning: "It is important always to remember that virtual contact cannot and must not take the place of direct human contact with people at every level of our lives."

Facebook replaced Christmas letters. Online dating replaced “friend of a friend” setups. Can online communities like Jesus Daily take the place of offline religious life, like what happens at synagogues and churches?

Contributors were invited to address whether or not online communities -- such as Facebook groups, blogs, and other social networking outlets -- will come to replace brick-and-mortar churches. Presumably this is more of an issue in the Protestant world, although it has a certain salience for Catholics, Muslims, Mormons, and Jews, as well as for those who blend faiths as they seek out spiritual community (see, for instance, the reference to "Bu-Jews," or those who try and mix certain aspects of Buddhism and Judaism).

"Supplementary" sites of religious experience and community, of course, have a long history, especially in the American context. So does fretting about religious siphoning and competition from the more tech-savvy or consumer-minded. On that, it seems like they're debating a settled point. Religious leaders and groups have spent years and decades, if not centuries, creating "communities" in physical places where meaning, direction, solace, empowerment, and all the emotional and social experiences we call "religion" can be found or fomented. That's a religious infrastructure that's fairly hardwired, both on the map and in the mind.

The better question, then, seems to not be about whether all that will go the way of the steam shovel and cowboy.*** Rather, it seems to me -- as it does to a few of the contributors -- that it's better to ask: What drives someone toward a Facebook faith? What is to be found there? What happens to someone when they seek out an online God group? Who and what stands to benefit - or lose - from an online religious experience? Does it create religious encounters, interchange, conflict, segmentation, segregation? What does it mean for religion in the private, public, and political spheres? Additionally, how do we, who study "religion and spirituality" write or think about online religion? Are our present conceptual models -- informed as they are by past forms of tech-mediated religion, from the book to TBN -- applicable or workable in the Facebook age?

I suppose it all comes down to a basic question: Looking back in fifty years' time (or perhaps even less), will the rise of online info-tech and social networking platforms have proven to have been revolutionary for religion?

*** Thanks to my son, Will, for introducing me to these provocative examples of creative destruction.

Dante for Dentists: The Resurrection of Christian History Magazine

by Elesha Coffman

Back before I started graduate school, and thus (ironically) before I had any idea what I was talking about, I edited a magazine called Christian History. Each quarterly issue focused on a person or theme, ranging just in my short years on staff from St. Antony and the Desert Fathers to the Huguenots, Dante to Historiography, religion in the American West to Thomas Aquinas. The magazine occupied a unique position as a bridge between the academy and “the rest of the world,” as most of the authors were scholars while most of the readers were—if I remember our market research aright—pastors, teachers, and dentists. A few years after I left, the magazine was shuttered for lack of revenue. I was sad to see it go.

Long story short, the organization that launched the magazine nearly 30 years ago, the Christian History Institute, has resurrected the title. They have already published a 100^th issue (many subscribers kept all of their back-issues, so numbering mattered more than publication date), a timely history of the King James Bible, and they are now seeking input on future issue topics. I pass this information along both because some readers of this blog might wish to check out the magazine and because the topical survey offers insight into the interests of non-scholarly readers. The potential topics survey recipients were asked to rate are:

George Muller
Amy Carmichael
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
History of Worship Music
The church’s involvement in the abolition of slavery in America
Vatican II’s impact on the worldwide church
History of Catechism (Early Church, Luther, etc.)
History of Presbyterianism
The Christian face of Ellis Island
Philip Schaff, the “father of church history”
The modern history of Christian charity
The African Church Fathers: Tertullian, Cyprian, Clement, Origen, Athanasius
History of Baptism
Charlemagne, 9^th century Holy Roman Emperor
Women mystics of the middle ages: Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena
George Fox, William Penn, and the Quakers

I have no idea which topics will score highest or actually be published in coming years. If I were still editor, I would have drafted a rather different list, though this one has several strong entries. Overall, the list reaffirms two things I learned through my experience at the magazine:

1. There are people outside the academy who care about religious history—and you can find a lot of them in churches. It is a persistent concern of mine that religion scholars’ fight for credibility in the (presumed) secular academy has cut them off from a still strongly religious public. I’m not saying that the public with an appetite for rigorous yet accessible church history is huge, but Christian History enjoyed a circulation of just under 50,000 when I was there, and that’s a whole lot more people than a university press can get to read a monograph.

2. 2. 2. Lay readers do not need to be pandered to. For every History of Worship Music Christian History delivered right over the plate, it also pitched a curveball like Solzhenitsyn. We used to call the latter “broccoli” issues, but we served them up the best we could, and the percentage of subscribers who intended to renew stayed in the 90s. The proposed topic that polled the best during my tenure was Aquinas—and my readers were overwhelmingly evangelical Protestants.

I wish the folks at CHI luck, reconnecting with that audience of educated non-specialists we academics too often fail to reach.