Religion Dispatches
…ct warns that “the significance and effectiveness of the various forms of [online] expression appear to be determined more by their popularity than by their intrinsic importance and value.” One can imagine the pope wringing his hands in frustration at the lack of civility in online arguments about anything from celebrity divorces to the afterlife: “In the digital environment, too, where it is easy for heated and divisive voices to be raised and wh…
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As the Episcopal Church begins its General Convention in Anaheim, California, many are waiting for the besieged denomination to begin anew conversations around gay bishops and other matters of sexuality as the march toward marriage equality continues to heat up [see comic below this post]. But, right out of the box, Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori is showing she’s able to create shockwaves of her own. In her opening statement…
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…thers lead to a further erosion of trust in “the media” and in information online. What are the implications for a growing distrust in media, information, and technology? The corpus of comments revealed a complex interplay of increased virtual interactions, while at the same time increased skepticism of online activity and information. In the end, the pastor and the majority of those interacting with his post seemed in agreement that the Let’s Go…
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…nifesto that for the National Day of Unplugging they’ve partnered with the online service VolunteerMatch to help participants connect to local organizations who might need their assistance. Assuming that “unplugging” necessarily makes us more connected or attentive to relationships with God, others and the rest of creation often seems to me, then, to blame technology for what is an essential human failing. Maybe your buzzing “crackberry” makes it…
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…o streaming platforms were likewise inundated, with an overall increase in online traffic of 15 to 20 percent, according to Web monitoring services. And, what’s more, they did so over the course of a 23-hour drama that allowed the event to engage viewers across a world clock. As the final miners reached the surface, online viewership topped more than four million page views per minute. While World Cup soccer and Wimbledon matches broadcast online…
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…er Summit award citation to Wildmon described One News Now as a “respected online news service.”) And those views were extreme, even by Martin’s standards of conservative evangelicalism. He said that the director of the news service, Fred Jackson, had a “hateful, hateful attitude” that “carried over” into stories. Martin described editorial meetings in which “liberals were accused of hating their kids,” while Chad Groening, who covers immigration,…
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…e in a world in which the bulk of kids’ time in and out of school is spent online and adults average about two hours a day online. Surely, petition, thanksgiving, intersession, and other forms of prayer will be part of the digitally integrated mix. But life after Google and Facebook is defined by active resource “sampling” and “mashing” and is moving toward a Web 3.0 world of increasing interactivity and co-creativity across virtual and physical d…
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…ople to conceive of meaningful lives in God-free ways — as painters in the service of art, as scientists in the service of knowledge. For David Brooks, in other words, it feels amazingly great to live amidst the spoils of our secular age! But really, how does it feel to live in an age like ours, having moved from “the all encompassing sacred cosmos, to our current world in which faith is a choice, in which some people believe, others don’t and a l…
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…m a right-wing nutjob. But this article was published in The Federalist—an online magazine firmly rooted in American conservatism, not its fringes. It was founded in 2013 by Ben Domenech and Sam Davis. Domenech, who’s married to Meghan McCain, has worked with right-wing think tanks like The Heritage Foundation and The Heartland Institute. To this day, it’s unclear who funds the magazine—although, according to the Center for Media and Democracy’s A…
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…ary service from age 19 through 21, and continues throughout a lifetime of service within hierarchical priesthood quorums. A textbook example of the traditional Mormon “man of steel and velvet” is Mitt Romney, whose inability to connect with the Republican base may have as much to do with his lack of familiar jocularity and chest-thumping outrage as it does with the perceived weirdness of his Mormon beliefs. As a convert, Beck missed out on crucia…
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