February 2011

Princeton Theological Review: The Church After Google

 I just learned (from Stephen Garner's Greenflame blog) that the last Fall issue of the  Princeton Theological Review was titled "The Church After Google" and as you might have guessed has lots of article pertinent to our topic. Let me quote the opening paragraph of Elizabeth Diass' Introduction:

The Internet is the printing press of the twenty-first century—it changes authority structures, democratizes information, and reframes societal expectations. The Princeton Theological Review’s fall issue is dedicated to examining church life and gospel proclamation with this phenomenon in mind. What issues should the church consider as it proclaims the gospel in a new technological climate of Google, the iPad, and Facebook? How do such global and local changes affect church ministry? What might they mean for the church’s self-presentation and engagement in public life? And at the core, what does it mean for the church to relate and communicate?

Articles and books added in January

In the month of January I added 44 articles/essays to the database. The includes the individual chapters of the books "Religion Online: Finding Faith on the Internet" and "Mediating Religion". Let me first list the 6 recently published articles:

  • A Summary of the Findings of the Study: Assessing the Impact of Online Courses on the Spiritual Formation of Adult Students - Mary Lowe
  • Has God Gone Global? Religion, Language, and Globalization - Annabelle Mooney, Nikolas Coupland
  • Tweet if You ? Jesus: Spiritual Identity & Community in the Digital Reformation - Elizabeth Drescher
  • Using Technology for Ministry: Trends, Principles, and Applications - Alfredo Vergel
  • Virtual Churches, Participatory Culture, and Secularization - Stefan Gelfgren
  • Visualization of the Taiwanese Buddhism web based on social network analysis - Chia- Hao Chang, Hsin-Chih Chen, Jia-Jane Shuai

New ASR website

As of February 1, the Association for the Sociology of Religion has a new website. The address is the same as it was sociologyofreligion.com. The announcement of the news is rather short, "We are pleased to announce the launch of our new ASR website," but they also say on the home page "Please bear with us, this new site is still under construction."

The Pope and the Internet

I just encountered how much difference thoughtful attention and analysis makes when presenting news. The fact: on January 24, on the occasion of the "45th World Day of Social Communications", Pope Benedict XVI issued a new encyclical titled "Truth, Proclamation and the Authenticity of Life in the Digital Age." You can read the English version here. If you scroll up or down on the same page you can read it in any of the five other languages.

The Amish and The Daily

Most print periodicals -- glossy magazines, local dailies and weeklies, academic journals ... -- are trying to figure out how to prepare themselves for the post-print world. With the advent and increasing popularity of the iPad, ebook readers and tablet computers a lot of them are betting on transforming themselves into a format that is suitable for these new devices.

GlaTube.com - Kosher videos

How simple would it be to make a Glatt kosher version of YouTube? All it takes is a bit of technical savvy (OK, a lot), people willing an interested in uploading videos and a team of editors who are willing to remove pictures of women. At least that's what transpires from Ynetnews.com's introduction to GlaTube, titled "Kosher version of Youtube hits Web."

Confession: A Roman Catholic App

I am not a Catholic and I don't own any i-device (iPad, iPhone iTouch, not even an iPod) but ,my corner of the online world, including the mainstream media is abuzz about "Confession: A Roman Catholic App" so I must cover it. Here is the timeline how I learned about it:

  • February 4 - Greenflame's blog entry pointed to the "Forgive me i-Father" piece at stuff.co.nz of the same day. That quotes one of the people behind the app ("his team had wanted to engage Catholics with new media in response to the Pope's World Communications Address last year, in which he spoke of its potential benefits") and his bishop ("Bishop Kevin Rhoades went as far as to grant it an imprimatur - official endorsement from a church authority.")
  • February 7 - David Sheppard's (great name for this) report on the app for Reuters under the heading "Bless me iPhone for I have sinned" gave a little more background information ("The app was developed with the help of Reverend Thomas Weinandy of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and Reverend Dan Scheidt, pastor of Queen of Peace Catholic Church in Mishawaka, Indiana.")
  • February 8 - News about the app showed up on a CNN blog as 'Catholics can confess on the go with new app."
  • February 9 - Longer version on CNN proper under "New app helps Catholics confess on the go" and an analysis of it at GetReligion.org as "Time for confession at Times of London". Maureen Dowd  also covered the app for the New York Times under the title "Forgive Me, Father, for I Have Linked".

Two newly published articles about religion and/in Second Life

In June 2009 there was a conference at Umeå University in Sweden about "Changing Societies – Values, Religions, and Education". A selection of the papers presented there were published in "Working Papers in Teacher Education" No. 7/2010. The whole issue of the journal can be downloaded as a single (570 kb) PDF file from here.

More coverage of the Confessions app

The iPhone app I mentioned a few days ago really grabbed the Vatican's, people's and journalists' attention. Three days after my previous blog entry about it I feel the need to share another batch of related links:

Christian Reflection: Virtual Lives

Christian Reflection is a journal published by The Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University. Each issue is organized aorund a single theme and the latest one, just published is about "Virtual Lives".