Here are some pictures of all the people I met at the various colleges and seminaries. Everyone was beautifully welcoming, and treated me like royalty. These guys should be careful because a white guy like me could get very used to that.

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Here are a few of the topics I’ll be talking about:

Human interaction in Cyberspace

The worldwide web (internet) is a virtual world (Cyberspace) alongside our natural world. Internet technology helps humans create social environments that shape their understandings of self, the world, and the other. Particularly, the web 2.0 technology and the networked communities, blogs and podcasts provide virtual space for all forms human interaction.

Religion Online

Ever since the birth of internet, religion is present and active in cyberspace. The increasing popularity of these Internet tools to express a religious identity and seek connections with others has impact on how people participate in religious institutions in the real world. Many fear that religion online will lead to the ultimate demise of organized religions like Christianity. Others think that the democratizing force of online religion affects the authority of the traditional religious offices. What is the future of religion in the digital age?!

Godcasting: exploring religious audiences and podcasting communities

Today, religious programs are the second most popular genre of podcasting. Blogging and podcasting are working to create and enhance online religious communities, and shape relationships between producers and consumers of podcasted religious content. Specifically, it is interesting to explore how bloggers connect online life in a highly technologised society with traditional notions of religious life. This workshop will be an exploration on how the web 2.0 technology and the networked communities, blogs and podcasts provide virtual space to explore new forms of religious expression.

IMPACT is is a Portal for Communication Research, Training and Formation. It is a Christian response to the challenge of the emerging communication culture. IMPACT program aims at forming leaders conversant with the predominant and emerging communication culture.

Call Description

In the initial waves of religion and internet research focus was often placed on how the internet would drastically change religious practice and ideology, due to growth of religious communities online and integration of religious rituals and practices into digital environments. Much attention was given to the novel uses and trends such as those seen in New Religious Movements online where once fringe or secretive religious groups were given a public platform making them more visible. Focus was also placed on how mainstream religions, such as Christianity and Islam, were appropriating to new media technologies or critiquing internet use and with a particular focus on the United states and Western Europe. As the internet has become increasingly embedded in the everyday lives of many researchers attention is now being drawn to the connection between online and offline religious practice, structures and belief. Furthermore, the rise of new software and models of internet communication, often referred to as Web 2.0, has created a heightened interest in issues of user lead content creation and web based social interaction. At the heart of these developments is an important issue, considering to what degree spiritual practices online are transformative or to what extent they reflect larger changes in religious culture and institutions offline. This special issue of Information, Communication and Society (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/rics) seeks to explore this area by considering what we think we know about the relationship between online and offline religion and what issues are still are in need of more detailed investigation.

Aims and Scope

In particular this special issues aims to explore the relationship between online and offline forms of religious practice and community. Key questions include:
- What is truly unique about the performance of religion online?
- How is the practice and conception of religion online connected to offline practices, communities and institutions?
- In what ways does religion online reflect trends seen offline in religious culture and practice?
- How do these transformations connect with issues of globalization and glocalization?

Possible topics may include (but are not limited to):

- The interactions between online communities and offline religious institutions
- How participants in online religious activities frame their involvement in offline religious groups
- Responses of offline religious authorities to religious manifestations and practices online from their community or tradition
- Religious organizations and/or denominations use of the internet, or debates regarding official policy towards and new media use
- Attempts of diasporic communities to connect with their faith tradition and sacred sites via the Internet
- Theoretical work that links research on contemporary religious practice to online religion, i.e. the relationship between internet use and everyday religion, the role of emotions in religious internet use
- How religious actors deal with questions of time, space and information management in online and offline society
- How Virtual worlds and computer games seek to present or re-present "sacred space"

Submission Details

Please submit a 300-500 word abstract to the guest editors as an e-mail attachment to religiononline@yahoo.com no later than 10 February 2010. The four best abstracts will also be submitted as a panel for consideration at the International Media, Religion and Culture Conference to be held in Toronto, Canada (9-13 August 2010, http://journalism.ryerson.ca/cms/websites/CMRC2010/index.aspx). Please include full contact information and a biographical note (up to 75 words) on each of the authors and indicate whether you wish to be considered for the MRC panel submission.

Authors of accepted abstracts will be notified by 6 March 2010 and will then be invited to submit a full paper to the guest editors. Final manuscripts should be no more than 8,000 words, including notes and references, conform to APA style, and submitted by 20 August 2010. Please note all papers will be subject to anonymous peer review following submission.

Important dates:

10 February 2010: Deadline for abstract submission
6 March 2010: Announcement of results and full paper invitations
9-13 August: MRC Conference (http://journalism.ryerson.ca/cms/websites/CMRC2010/index.aspx)
20 August 2010: Submission of full papers October 2011: Publication of special issue

In this system of relationality three levels of naming are identified. The first is the level of text: naming beliefs and values that are in common with others, or are distinct from others. They may include shared stories and experiences. The second is the level of speaker, which is mainly identification of some common ground with other people. This may include the fact they are in similar spaces, or follow similar discursive practices. And the third is the level of structure: naming the sources of authority or institutions that create connections.

Applying this model to my survey of emerging church bloggers, I’ve identified three levels of tension in their quest to discern a common religious identity. I can only name them as tensions. Blogging interaction is not constrained by formalised membership process or adherence to any fixed set of principles or ethics. Bloggers bring diverse and unique experiences to the conversation, and listen to a variety of distinct and unequal voices from both within and without the study sample. What remain are assertions of comparisons and contrasts contained in reflections of religious experiences, conversations with readers and responses to other bloggers.

Orthodoxy-heresy tension

As I’m writing this post I find that Pete Rollins’ new book is called The orthodox heretic, showing this tension is well known in the emerging church conversation. In the face of Christian institutional practices and doctrines, bloggers express a sense of marginalisation. Popular movies illustrate religious life more than a Sunday sermon or contemporary worship music. Conversations with prisoners, atheists, and those rejected by their congregations offer more inspiration for theological reflection than local church programs. So bloggers welcome the term heretic, describing one who embraces doubt when religious truths clash with apparent facts, and reject doctrine and piety that debilitate themselves and others from living faithfully.

Yet, when meeting religious pluralism and secular humanism, bloggers hear the call to assert some Christian fundamental beliefs. These include the story of the resurrection and the image of the Triune God. It appears not an project of evangelism, or of reasserting a Christianity within the culture of bloggers’ experience, but more an endeavour to locate a common point of difference from other faiths, from which solidarity may be sought. For bloggers orthodoxy is based on an understanding of the Christian witness at the emergence of the apostolic writings, a period recalled (whether factually or mythically) as pluralistic in culture and religion, where Empire values clashed with Judaic nostalgia and bureaucracy, and where Christianity was subversive and counter-cultural. Parallels between this period and the entrance of postmodernism in contemporary culture are acknowledged.

Inclusion-exclusion tension

“If you come, you’re in” appears to be a popular emerging church axiom. There appears no condition of entry into the conversation, no ritual or marker by which one can claim membership in the group. A similar impression my be drawn from the sample of bloggers. In interaction with commenters, bloggers welcome responses from and conversations with non-Christians and anti-Christians, and are reluctant to filter comments from spammers and flamers. In cross-blog associations, bloggers are opposed to using symbolic objects that connect them with a definable group (e.g. “friend of emergent” logos), and are reluctant to adopt the term “emerging church” in self-description (though some like the term “missional”). The network of links made from one blogger to another shows the sample is more a collection of small groups, based on conversations about particular ideas, or offline connections, than a cohesive group. So while tags and searches may identify their sites as emerging church blogs, bloggers generally consider themselves on the edge, or outside, of any sense of emerging church community, or reject the notion that there is one.

It is easier for bloggers to set themselves against certain descriptions of religious identity than alongside them. They are not “churched”. They are not “mega-church”. Yet even these notions are up for debate. Some bloggers attend Hillsong events, and some talk favourably of traditional congregation-based ministry. Blogging allows members of the sample to present a identity that sits within a fluid and expanding network of connections, rather than a static group. Bloggers are able to “remain on the edge” of discursive endeavours to define and locate them.

The tension of words

Members of the sample have used the blogosphere as a space to reassess terms such as liberal, postmodern, Baptist, emerging, evangelical, traditional, Protestant and missional. In this space, bloggers endeavour to remove themselves from the institutional structures that define these terms and create borders and distinctions. Bloggers do share, however, a certain level of formal education, and have access to academic resources that allow them to engage in theological discourse. Writing is highly valued among the bloggers in the sample, and the opinions of many are drawn from the same range of published works. Bloggers point to a library of books from which an emerging church theology and missiology may be sourced.

Bloggers are keenly aware that academic discourse excludes voices from the emerging church conversation, and that those bloggers who can engage in it are given greater authority than others. They try to bring other forms of information to attention of readers, such as other websites, music and art, and the sites of less-know bloggers. Yet, since it’s easier to reproduce words than other media in a blog, the blogosphere tends to favour writing. Bloggers that are considered good writers are by-and-large given more attention, and those that can offer well-versed criticisms of other writings can attract comments and links.

For bloggers in the sample, religious identity is not fixed, but emerges out of tensions that are exposed and played out in interaction with commenters and through hyperlink-based networks with other bloggers. Bloggers find their place, not in the resolution of the tensions, but in the act of identifying and engaging them.

• A desire to include in the conversation those who don’t go to church, and are even anti-church
• A belief that pious behaviour and Christian behaviour are not the same
• A belief that secular culture has much to say about Christian belief and practice

The blogosphere presents a need to rethink the conceptualisation of community for both religion and research purposes. It is hardly a bounded community. While those involved in conversation through posts and comments on one blog may see the limits of the communicative space in the one web page, however bloggers are connected with other bloggers who are connected again with others in a way that the limits of communication cannot be drawn. Network is a better word to describe the constellation of connections that bloggers and readers navigate through the blogosphere.

Moreover, Castells suggests that the idea of community in the offline world, as a point of comparison with online community, may be idealised beyond the reality. Modern Western life, for the author, has seen the rise of personal relationships outside families and embedded communities (schools, churches, sporting groups, workplaces) as a dominant pattern of sociability, to the embodiment of “me-centered networks”.

It represents the privatization of sociability. This individualized relationship to society is a specific pattern of sociability, not a psychological attribute. It is rooted, first of all, in the individualization of the relationship between capital and labor, between workers and the work process, in the network enterprise. It is induced by the crisis of patriarchalism, and the subsequent disintegration of the traditional nuclear family, as constituted in the late nineteenth century. It is sustained (but not produced) by the new patterns of urbanization, as suburban and exurban sprawl, and the de-linking between function and meaning in the micro-places of megacities, individualize and fragment the spatial context of livelihood. And it is rationalized by the crisis of political legitimacy, as the growing distance between citizens and the states stressed the mechanisms of representation, and fosters individual withdrawal from the public sphere. The new pattern of sociability in our societies is characterized by networked individualism. (pp. 128-129)

Castells blames not the Internet on the rise of networked individualism, but sees that this pattern of sociability works best online, as it "provides an appropriate material support for the diffusion of networked individualism as the dominant form of sociability” (p. 131).

Castells’ idea suggests the idealisation of community in a formal religious context. Especially for post-Vatican II Catholicism and mainstream Protestantism, the congregation is highly prized as a sacrament, the face of Christ’s presence on earth, the starting point and destination of the church’s mission. But in a late modern society the congregation cannot singularly represent the religious identity and practice of its members, but can only be a node in the network of everyday living that informs those things.

So in these times perhaps “community” is not a description of what is, but of the ideals that either attract or repel people from engagement in religious activity. Community is a construct. The blogosphere is a place where religious people not only construct community online through their interactions, but engage in the practice of discursively reconstructing religious community as a whole.

In line with stereotypes of the larger emerging church movement, bloggers I’ve studies are nearly all professional/student and have some degree of university education. Most have a theological qualification and some formal ministry training. Yet bloggers devalue their own training and education in conversations (though not those of others) to the point of self-deprecation. They do it a variety of ways:

1. Labelling their own opinions and propositions in posts and comments as “rants”, “random thoughts” or “musings”. These labels also appear as the titles of categories and tags, and titles or in subtitles of blogs themselves.

2. Using words and expressions such as “IMHO” (in my honest/humble opinion), “Not that I’m an expert but”, “I reckon” and “Just what I’m thinking about at the moment”.

3. If they do make a claim to some knowledge or expertise about a subject, it is based on claims of experience in church life or ministry, rather than education.

I think this etiquette practice represents two ideological stances. It firstly stands for the emerging church’s distaste for hierarchy. Though emerging church bloggers do not deny the benefits of good theological training, or are less than grateful for the opportunity to enter higher study, they do not want to set themselves apart from those without it. Secondly, it shows an interest in the private over the public. While posts and conversations may be centred around public issues, and bloggers recognise a public audience, they prefer a personal perspective. For them, any reference to qualifications represents a formal and public image, that masks a more private or inner perspective.

Update: As Rob mentioned in his comment below, emerging church bloggers are not the only bloggers who recognise this etiquette. Before Facebook and Myspace, blogs were a popular social networking tool for teenagers, and Bortree (2005) has noted in her study of such bloggers that ingratiation to others in teenagers’ network involved some suppplication, including downplaying their “coolness” in comparison to other people. Among these bloggers it was cool to think you weren’t cool.