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26 -27 November 2009
Monash University Conference Centre
Level 7, 30 Collins Street
Melbourne
Registration (includes lunches and morning and afternoon tea):
$ 160 wage earners
$ 100 students and non-wage earners* *
*CALL FOR PAPERS *
This conference will focus on religious communication and religious aesthetic forms. The underlying impulse is to bring into dialogue scholarly work undertaken in religious studies and theology with debates and research in the fields of communications and cultural studies, including performance, literary, visual and aesthetic analyses. The premise of the conference is that communication and aesthetic forms play an active role in shaping a religious culture’s sensibility rather than merely reflecting that religious community’s ideology, logic or worldview. In short, religious communication makes religious experience meaningful, possible and effective.
The conference will have a wide interpretation of ‘religious communication’, including, but extending religious communication beyond ‘communication studies’ understood as ‘mass media’, to include religious modes of communication such as prayer, sermons, revelation, art, theatre and ritual, as well as religious uses of mass media. We invite papers from the perspectives across the humanities and social sciences, including literature, music, performance, film and television, anthropology, sociology and history, as well as religious studies and theology. We also invite papers from all religious perspectives.
The conference is particularly interested in exploring:
* Religious affect and its relationship to different media (e.g. song, prayer, architecture, film, performance, images in general)
* Religious interpretation and textual hermeneutics (e.g. literalism versus symbolism)
* The use of communication media and art forms by religious groups to create a sense of community
* Communication as a ‘portal’ or window to the ‘divine’ and/or the ’sacred’
* Cross-cultural adaptation and the creolisation of religious forms
* Religion and the sacred in popular culture
* Modernity, post-modernity and religious communication.
This conference will be held immediately prior to the World Parliament of Religions, providing an opportunity for reflection on religious practice and the relationship between religious identity and the aesthetic forms of religious communication, and cross cultural communication.
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 22 June 2009
Please email an abstract of 200-250 words, and a short biographical note to:
Elizabeth.Coleman
Conveners:
Dr Elizabeth Burns Coleman
Associate Professor Gil-Soo Han
Communications and Media Studies, ECPS, Monash University
Supported by:
English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University Performance and Social Aesthetics Research Unit, Monash University
http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/ecps/conferences/religious-communication/
Mon 15 Jun 2009
Emergence of emerging church blogger identities
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In my thesis I present a model of discursive analysis of identity, that is built on the sociocultural linguistic theory of identity and interaction developed by Bucholtz and Hall (2005). Their theory is based on the premise that identity is not static, and ill-defined by social categories, but is rather emergent, i.e. comes out of, and moves around, contexts of interaction. The formation of identity is the setting of oneself in relation to others. For Bucholtz and Hall, it is a discursive project, a system of naming connections to and disconnections from ourselves.
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.
Fri 5 Jun 2009
Completion seminar
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So today I presented my entire research project to a panel of judges at RMIT. We do things a little differently than our antipodean colleagues: instead of submitting a thesis then defending it to a group of readers, we present our findings at least three months prior to our expected completion date, and the panel decides whether our work will be worth reading when it’s done.
Now at the risk of immodesty, I think I’m a good public speaker. Even when nerves get to me, I manage to engage an audience in a story or a message that always includes a good laugh somewhere. Years of teaching, preaching, performing, add a little brain, and you got the makings for a good time. But for some reason my tongue decided to revolt this afternoon, and my brain went on a little strike. I forgot really important details that had been in my head for days and weeks, I failed to recall the reason why some data was on certain PowerPoint slides and not others, and wasted a lot of time getting my mouth around stuff early in the presentation and had to rush through the main points of my overall findings and arguments. In short, my completion seminar sucked while it also blowed.
At every graduate research seminar I’ve presented since late 2006 there has been one panel member, who is a brilliant scholar and really nice person, but whose mind I can never predict. She always offer some sort of criticism that I have trouble understanding, and each time I think I’ve got her worked out, she comes up with something else to trouble me further. Don’t get me wrong, her critiques have ultimately been helpful, but it’s always frustrating to know that no matter how hard you’ve worked, there’s always something else to have to figure out.
Anyway, her only criticism today was that she read my thesis summary (presented in previous posts) and utterly loved it. She thought it was concise and catchy, that I had a great grasp of both language and my entire concept. And she thought she’d see more of it at the presentation. But all she got was detail and numbers and formality.
The total bugger of that was for the past few weeks, while I’ve rocked myself to and fro in a corner muttering to myself in total panic about this completion seminar, I’ve been telling myself to ignore my own tendencies, to present a detailed model, offer as much data as you can, try to be as quantitative as qualitative, and back up any musings with real discovery. But if I had only trusted my own instincts, and made a show the way I would want to hear one, I would have finally made her happy, after all these years. Damn! I have to believe in myself. I can’t believe it.
Anyway, the seminar was finished at 3.30pm. At 4.30pm I got a call from my supervisor, who told me that yes-indeedy there were some issues that will be clarified over the next few emails and meetings. but I may be assured that the university is looking forward to reading my thesis when submitted in August.
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