fishers, surfers and casters

Stephen asked for this review a while back. It’s been so long since I’ve read it that I’m not sure my review will be thorough, but I’ll give it a shot.

Religion in Cyberspace presents the latest in research into online religion. Rather than seeking an overview of how the Internet is used for religious purposes, the book endeavours to map out what researchers are thinking about the interplay between Internet, religion and everyday life. The introductory chapter makes this clear: we are in the advent of a new wave of research into religion online that considers how offline religious practice and online religion are related in the lives of 21st century users.

Part I: Coming to terms with religion and cyberspace revisits and revises old theories and practices of research into religion online. Concepts about the virtual and the real are explored again, with the realisation that many in our culture are spending more and more time in online spaces, where important transactions are made and encounters are given meaning. Meditations on the future possibilities of religion are reconsidered, together with ponderings of how much of “real world” religion will possibly be replicated in cyberspace.

Part II: Religious authority and conflict in the age of the Internet delves into the social structures that constitute online religious communities, bearing uptopian and dystopian imaginings with actual occurrences. I found the article by Eileen Barker on authority and control in online communities fascinating and disconcerting.

Part III: Constructing religious identities and communities online was (obviously) of particular use to my study on religious blogging, not just in presenting findings on how the Internet allows for identity performance, but in how the Internet favours contextual theology and allows for marginal religious attitudes to find a home and a centre.

Although published in the last couple of years, the apparent absence of any research into Web 2.0 applications – like blogs and social networking sites – does not mean the book does not prepare the reader for thinking about how religion online will be shaped – and influence the use of – these new technologies. I see the book as a great milestone in the development of Internet research into religion, marking the next step forward for those interested in religion online and establishing a canvas for picturing the place where online and offline religion meet.

Technorati tag: online religion, Morten Hojsgaard, Margit Warburg

I confess I do it. I’m not proud of it, but I find myself invovled in it about once a week or two. It boosts me, gives me a nice surprise every once in a while that makes me feel good about myself.

I enter “Paul Teusner” into a google search.

Don’t tell me you’ve never done it.

Just now I did it and found a new entry in a British Christian magazine website. This guy, John Allan (just in case he googles himself he find a link here) has wrtten an article of where to find stuff on YouTube relating to Christianity. He mentions me as an “Australian academic”.

Guess I’m going to have to get used to being called that. Don’t think I deserve it just yet.

The high pressure that normally rests in the centre of the continent has been replaced by a significantly large and slow low pressure cell. This means that we’ve had a very tropical summer here is the valley for the past week. The grumbles that have come with it have been that a thirty-degree day has felt like a forty degree day (and we’ve actually had forty-degree days here) thanks to the high humidity, which has made all the papers in my study damp and weak. Printing has been a nightmare.

The upside of it all has been the rain. Soft yet reliable, every day. People have told me stories of how they’ve spent quiet afternoons actually sitting in the rain, enjoying the discomfort. Some days the rain has been hard, yet people in the street don’t run to avoid it, but come into the office soaked and elated.

We have been very thankful this week.

I wonder if the emerging church movement has become too intellectual for its own good.

After World War II the evangelicals – Barth, Bonhoeffer, Moltmann – came to fore with a new contextual theology that grew out of their experiences of atrocity and betrayal in Europe that told them that rational does not always equal moral, that strong faith really does require suffering, and at the centre of all experience was the Triune God. The discoveries and challenges of these thinkers were welcomed by the Church of the day, in the midst of a continent trying to rebuild itself.

So these thinkers were offered seats in our universities, given the space to develop their thoughts to pass on to students who would become academics who would teach more students who, in turn, would teach and write and develop new interpetations of faith in the world, new theories.

And while we remember with admiration the struggles in which these theologies were forged, we also recognise their irrelevance or inaccessibility today, where we sit on the margins of academic, systematic, rationalised theological discourse, and we look for a new contextual theology – something that gives life and meaning to living today on the fringes of both church and society.

Are bloggers of the emerging church movement headed towards the same fate? Those who see themselves on the fringes of the established church and looking for a new way of living in faith in this world, engage in the development of a new contextual theology, born out of being “postmodern”, of living in a secular and pluralist world. But are bloggers becoming trapped by their own blogopshere, where their experiences of emerging church are being seen through the lens of other bloggers, where the list of subscriptions on their RSS reader becomes the main context in which their contextual theology is developing?

Web 2.0 has been successful, so far, in bringing theology out of the seminary. Are we in danger of trapping it in the blog, where the printed word is still the dominant medium, and where the most authoritative bloggers are tertiary educated, well read, and not afraid to engage in intellectual debates?

I’ve been doing some interviews with bloggers over the past few days and have found a reluctantly positive answer to this question in our conversations. Some find EC bloggers their only experience of the emerging church, and the most reliable source of tools with which to make sense of their offline world. Some accept that the emphasis on text makes some blogs too intellectual for a wider audience, while others still are put off by most EC blogs, too involved in themselves and their creation of buzz words and concepts that are “cool” but irrelevant to local (emerging) church life.

If those in the EC see the steady decline of mainstream church (Church 1.0) attendance as a sign that something new will rise, perhaps we will see similar challenges happening in Church 3.0. Maybe we can expect a “post-emerging” expression of religion?

Or can Web 2.0 offer a more malleable, responsive and attentive relationship with the EC offline than the academy had for churches in the late modern era?

Technorati tags: emerging church, religious discourse