using the readings, please complete test 1450 PS. there is also a book that i will pass onto you once you download the rest of the class readings

Religion is expressed in the way that practitioners consume, comment on, and commemorate both religious and seemingly secular experiences.

Participation in media worlds is not necessarily passive; people often critically and creatively engage with the media that they consume.

Participating in media culture can itself take on some of the form and function of religion.

New media are not simply fresh tools of communication, amplifying voices in new ways. Rather, new forms of media make possible new ways of thinking, new practices and rituals, and new ways of relating. To understand the digital culture that is emerging, students of media, religion, and culture look for places where new media, with their capacities for sampling and hybridity, become part of religious practice and ask what religion looks like in these new media spaces.

Religious change is not a new phenomenon. There are many examples of how religions have changed as people try out new ideas and practices in new cultural and media contexts. Consider the development of the Sunni and Shi’a traditions as distinct ways of being Muslim, or the way that the American “Beat”poets of the 1940s and’50s adopted and adapted Zen Buddhism to their context and purposes, or the way access to radio gave birth to new Evangelical voices.

Our current digital society is not thefirst to experience religious change, but still it is important to think how religion is changing in the digital culture.

The pace of change seems quicker than it did in the past. Understandings of authority seem to be changing. Even among those who continue traditional forms of religion, fewer people submit to the authority of the tradition. Instead, they regard themselves as holding the authority to decide what they accept and reject from the tradition and how they practice. There seems to be an eclectic spirit at work today. Rather than seeing religious traditions as requiring forced choices, people feel free to“sample”and combine elements into their more individualized religious identities.

This chapter explores some of the implications of the way people work with inherited and adopted material to construct religious identities. They use media to express identity and establish community. When people tweet,“Insha’Allah” (God willing) or respond to a Facebook post saying,“Thanks be to God,”they bring their religious life into the social media space andfind religious community there. People also use these media spaces to comment on religion, or on social issues from a religious perspective. Popular speaker and public intellectual Diana Butler Bass has over 4,500“friends”on Facebook where she often provides a liberal Protestant perspective on religious matters. Often her provocative posts receive dozens of comments and reposts. Brick-and-mortar temples, synago- gues, and churches often have elaborate online sites, while other religious spaces seem to exist only or primarily online. For example, at Prarthana.com you willfind a site providing“online Hindu Temple services.”Should you want to travel to pilgrimage sites in India to offerpuja(a form of worship in which an object, or the mind, body, or soul are offered to God), you can make arrangements through the website. But it is also possible to perform“online puja.”The site is not only a source of information or support for embodied worship elsewhere but a location for religious practice.

Consumption: active and passive, reading and performing, and prosumption One lively conversation about religion, particularly in capitalist cultures, draws on a wider examination of how people use consumption to express religious identity. Some suggest that people participate in religion by purchasing reli- gious goods such as devotional art, prayer beads, books, and so forth. This seems, at least atfirst, a more passive form of religious life than the constructive practice and belief we have considered to this point. Consumption has been said to encourage this passivity, allowing powerful market forces to shape people’s values and attitudes.

The argument that religion can be consumed starts with the observation that the objects and images we surround ourselves with say something about us.

Sometimes this connection between object or image and identity is direct and straightforward. When the great Brazilian soccer player Pelé wore his uniform, it signified that he was a soccer player and a part of a particular team. When he played for Brazil in the World Cup, the uniform symbolized something larger and more complex about his identity. Not only did it show that Pelé was Brazilian, the uniform was a symbol of the ability of Brazilian athletes and perhaps of the vibrancy of Brazilian culture more broadly. Something even more complex happens when someone who is not a member of the team, perhaps not even a soccer player, purchases and wears a reproduction of Pelé’s jersey. Fans do so in order to suggest some connection between themselves, the iconic footballer, and the attitudes and abilities he represents.Believing and practicing in a digital world37 Advertising often encourages this sort of mystical connection to products by suggesting that the purchase of goods can provide status or well-being. When a McDonald ’s ad proclaims, “You deserve a break today, ”it seeks to turn the act of buying fast food into an expression of self-worth. Ads for luxury goods, whether cars or couture, often imply that a primary reason for purchasing these products is the statement they make about your success, sophistication, or social standing. Other identities are also expressed in this way. For several generations the iconic image of the hero of the Cuban revolution, Che Guevara, has been emblazoned on posters and T-shirts. By purchasing and displaying the image, people who may otherwise live entirely conventional lives claim a connection to a revolutionary spirit. One criticism of consumption is that it substitutes possession for experience and in doing so it promises things it cannot deliver. Just as buying sports para- phernalia connects the non-athlete to the status and assumed values of the athlete, owning an elegant home in a privileged community makes a claim of stability and status, even if the purchaser may be mortgaged to the hilt and in danger of foreclosure.

Similar arguments are often made about the fans of popular culture. By “ consuming ”action films, romance novels, or super hero comic books, the audience builds a connection with these narratives and images. This is not a new idea. Sigmund Freud (1908) saw the adventure stories and popular romances of his day as an escapist form of wish ful fillment in which the reader identi fies with the hero who achieves erotic and material successes beyond that which are possible for the reader. Freud assumed that the consumption of these stories was rooted in a wish for satisfaction that was lacking in the reader ’s life.

So, for example, reading romance novels served as a kind of shared daydream in which an audience dissatis fied with their own romantic lives identi fied with the heroine ’s romantic trials and ultimate success.

Consumption is a part of religious life when one buys a book by a spiritual teacher, pays for a child to attend a religious school, or purchases a statue of the Buddha. This attitude also seems to be at work when someone assumes that individual practices, beliefs, images, and icons can be disconnected from the integrated system of belief and practice that they are a part of and repurposed in individualistic religious projects. Within the system of consumption, the objects, practices, and narratives substitute for the experience. Thus, in the consumption of religion it is not necessary to read the book, for the child to pay attention, or for you to meditate on the Buddha for some religious end to be served. It appears that merely owning a Tibetan prayer bowl or a Hopi Kachina figure evokes the spiritual power of these objects and incorporates them into one ’s religious identity (Figure 3.1).

In the sample re flection inChapter 1, and more fully in Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (2011), Kathryn Lofton demonstrates how this works for the audience of the enormously popular talk show host Oprah Winfrey. Lofton suggests that Winfrey is not merely the moderator of her TV world, but a model of both the eclectic religious identity creation described inChapter 1and of the 38 Religious identity in media cultures balanced and fulfilled life. Bringing Freud ’s interpretation into conversation with Lofton suggests that Winfrey ’s life is a fantasy or daydream that satis fies something that is lacking in the lives of her viewers. While the audience may not realistically be able to be like this hugely successful woman, they make an imaginative connection to her by buying the products she recommends.

Winfrey speaks, for instance, about the value of keeping a journal of your re flections, in fact she encourages having multiple journals for separate aspects of your life. Lofton suggests that, within the consumption system, even if you do not go to the extent of actually writing in the journals, simply purchasing the elegant blank books and expensive pens that Oprah recommends connects you to this practice and, by extension, to the power and status of Winfrey herself. Others go further, suggesting that it is not merely that one can consume religion but that consumption itself has become a religious practice and a form of religious meaning. In the wittily titled The Sacred Santa: Religious Dimensions of Consumer Culture (2002), Dell deChant traces the rituals, religious figures, and duties of consumption itself as a religious practice. He suggests that the eternal process of acquiring and consuming has become the central source of meaning in American culture. Consumption is, in e ffect, the national religion, and its central festival is Christmas, shorn of its historic ties to Christianity and focused on the sainted hero of consumption, Santa Claus.

Active and passive consumption Much of the critique of consumption rests on the assumption that consumers are powerless in the face of the forces that produce the goods and narratives they consume. The argument goes something like this: Once people lived in local communities where there were direct connections between the producers Figure 3.1 Hopi Kachina figure Believing and practicing in a digital world 39 and consumers of culture. People created art and culture for themselves and their neighbors. Their songs, stories, and symbolic goods were deeply con- nected to the actual struggles and successes of their lives. In this way coal miners sang songs about the difficulty of life in the mines, Japanese painters painted landscapes that reproduced both their misty mountains and a Shinto sensibility about the world, and so forth. However, industrialization and the resulting commercialization of culture led to a disconnection between produ- cers and consumers. Now culture is a product to be reproduced and marketed to distant audiences. In such a system, those who controlled the means of cultural production imposed cultural forms and assumptions on distant and less powerful cultures. Thus, American movies, television, and music not onlyfind an audience around the world, theyfill up the commercial media space, leaving no room for the performance of local forms of art and culture. In doing so, they teach cultural norms and values that are often foreign to their international consumers.

It has been argued, for instance, that television is at least partly to blame for the incidence of eating disorders in the Pacific Islands (Beckeret al. 2002).

Local cultures in places like Fiji used to affirm that women and girls could be both bigandbeautiful. Once television arrived in their culture, though, it taught the citizens to aspire to American forms of beauty that made no sense in the context of Polynesian physiology or extant esthetic norms. Examples like this point to the losses inherent in this sort of cultural change and invite reflection on the question of who shapes the images and stories with which audiences engage.

The power of mediated images and narratives is obvious, and viewers in every culture should be attentive to the way that powerful economic, political, and social forces shape the range of choices available. Yet there are reasons to ques- tion some of these assumptions. The passive-consumption theory used above treats people as though they are powerless in the face of a media onslaught, suggesting that they simply absorb the values and assumptions that are embedded in the dominant cultural materials available. Is this an accurate understanding of people and of the way they engage with culture and media systems?

Reading and performing culture The suggestion that consumption inevitably force-feeds attitudes and values into society in some ways misunderstands the complexity of the relationship between people and the cultural texts, images, and objects they employ in expressing their identity. The consumption model thinks of culture in the way that generations of literary scholars once thought about poems and stories.

It assumes that the meaning these things convey is set in the text. The author of the text, or in the case of sacred texts perhaps the God or gods at work through the author, is the source of the meaning, and the audience members are the largely passive recipients. Their task is at best to be careful readers who tease out what the author is telling them.

“Reader response criticism”takes exception to the core assumption of this way of thinking about literature. Reader response critics argue that meaning is 40Religious identity in media cultures produced in the act of reading the text. Meaning is not something hidden within the text but created by readers in interaction with the text. Thus, rather than seeking Shakespeare’s vision or intent, reader response critics focus on how readers interpret the poems and how audiences experience the plays. They note that individual readers interpret the texts differently at different stages of their lives and that at different periods in history contemporary cultural concerns bring different issues in the text to the forefront. These various readers are often in conversation with each other. Interpretive communities rise up within cultures, focusing in unique ways on the texts and having interpretive conversations with the texts and with each other. Readers bring their own experience of things like love and disappointment, power and prejudice, and gender and race into conversation with the text.

The termstextandreaderare often used as analogies for non-literary experiences.

Afilm can be seen as“text”and the viewer to be“reading”thefilm; music, too, could be“text”and the listener could“read”the performance. This analogy can be helpful in that it encourages us to think about the way meaning emerges between the object or experience and person taking it in. But the analogy can also lead us astray. In thinking of them as“texts,”viewers run the risk of reducingfilms to their dialog, disregarding the powerful effect the images, editing, and composition can exert on one’s experience of afilm. Similarly, we fail to get at the full experience of hearing a song if we disregard rhythm, tune, instrumentation, and harmony. Consider alt-rocker Tori Amos’s 2001 cover of rapper Eminem’s’97 Bonnie & Clyde. The two performances could not be more different, though they are drawing from the same lyrics. In the end it is not the words that differentiate the recordings but variations in style, pace, voicing, and so forth evoking vastly different responses in the listener.

Another term connected to approaches that focus on the audience isreception.

Studies of reception focus on how the text, cultural object, or experience is received by particular audiences. Rather than focusing on the relationship between the author and the text, reception studies look at the relationship between the text and the audience. The reception approach is also applied to non-textual esthetic creation and cultural experience. Just as we can consider what happens when someone reads a text, we can ask what happens when they gaze on a painting or movie, or when they hear a piece of music. Religious texts, images, architecture, and ritual can all be“read”in this way. These approaches recognize that different audiences read or receive the same esthetic experience in different ways. Alongside the question of what these things may have meant to the original audiences, we can explore what they mean to those who“read”them today.

Consider the varied meanings that a building might carry. In the early 300s CE, in the city now called Istanbul, the emperor Constantine had theHagia Sophia or“Church of the Holy Wisdom”built. When the Ottomans conquered the region in 1453, they turned this structure into a mosque, plastering over the Byzantine mosaics of Christian saints. With the establishment of the secular Turkish state in the 1930s, theHagia Sophiawas converted to a museum. Its Believing and practicing in a digital world41 mosaics were uncovered in the hope that the stately building would stand as a symbol of a less warlike interaction of religions. According to the theory at hand, theHagia Sophia could be considered a kind of cultural “text ”which was “ read ”differently by di fferent viewers at di fferent times in history. At the time it was built it would have served for some as a sign that Christianity was now the o fficial religion of the empire, while for Muslims it was a symbol of the repression of their religions. When it became a mosque these relationships were reversed, and the building continued to be a symbol of the religious con flict of the age and region. These meanings of this contested space have changed over time, representing the dominance of two di fferent religions and later the possibility of shared religious space within a common culture. Our location in history, and our own cultural and religious identities, sh ape the way we interpret this sacred space.

The responses to the controversial film The Passion of the Christ provide a more recent demonstration of the variety of meanings that a single work can carry. Mel Gibson, a member of a conservation movement within Roman Cath- olicism, directed this film about Jesus ’arrest, trial, and cruci fixion. To deal with the reception of the film requires us to consider both the di fferent interpretations that critics have made of the film and the way those di fferences were expressed.

(For a fuller discussion of the film and the con flict, see Mahan, 2004.) Even before the film was released it generated wide discussion. Some responded to the film from an esthetic standpoint, considering its value as, simply, a film. For many, though, The Passionwas an effort to translate the sacred text of their faith into film. Others in the Jewish community regarded the film as anti-Semitic, arguing that it revived long-abandoned arguments that Jews were responsible for the death of Christ. Conservative Catholics and Evangelical Protestants came together to defend The Passion. They used their internal media systems to promote the film and rented theaters to provide free screenings. Liberal Christians, on the other hand, disagreed with the film ’s theological position and its violence. Both sides wrote letters to the newspapers, held ritualized protests, and appropriated images from the film to support their positions (Figure 3.2). Viewing the DVD became, for some Christians, a regular part of preparation for Easter. For a few years there was a cottage industry of books, articles, and public forums through which critics, religious and secular, interpreted this movie.

Prosumption In making sense of the consumption of religion, re flect on how people interact with the religious objects, images, and narratives they consume. What are they doing when they “consume ”a religious film, a sacred building, or some other manifestation of religion? The actual practice of audiences, fans, and religious practitioners suggests that they are more than passive consumers. They actively engage with the mediated forms of religion and culture. Meaning is created by the activity of readers when they engage with, re flect on, and act in response to the mediated religion 42 Religious identity in media cultures and culture they consume. Futurist Alvin Toffler is generally credited with first combining the terms consumption and production to describe the activity of these active readers and receivers (To ffler 1980). Prosumers simultaneously consume the products of mass culture and produce out of it something new and more individual. Consider the cultural phenomenon of George Lucas ’s film franchise Star Wars . This series of films that began in 1977 explores a mythic con flict between the heroic forces of good (the rebel alliance) and the forces of evil and repression (the empire). However, the Star Warsphenomenon is not adequately described by simply recounting the movies. What could be called a “Star Wars universe” developed around the films. O fficial merchandise is licensed that includes action figures and toys, posters, costumes, books, comic books, and on and on.

Response to the film takes on a life of its own, a force far beyond Lucas ’s control. Fans form clubs, gather at conventions, and write their own uno fficial Star Wars stories. Children play out Star Warsfantasies on playgrounds. People produce parodies and also quote the films as a source of encouragement and moral direction. Some even profess to practice “Jediism, ”a religion based on the belief in the metaphysical guiding power in the film known as “The Force. ”A quick Web search today reveals dozens of sites related to the films, some of them overtly professing this religious connection to the films and the culture that surrounds them.

Just as we might understand esthetic experience by focusing on the activities of the audience, we can understand religious experience by focusing on the activities of the practitioners. We saw this in the way religious audiences appro- priated The Passion of the Christ into their discourse and practice. As with the Star Wars universe, fans may develop complex practices around popular culture that serve ritual and meaning-making purposes similar to those in religion. These activities challenge two common assumptions about media and religion.

First is the assumption that those who engage with media/religion are mere passive consumers. The examples just given suggest, in contrast, that people Figure 3.2The Passion of the Christ demonstrations Believing and practicing in a digital world 43 may actually be active participants such as when they take up digital narratives in their own projects of individual and group identity. The second assumption being challenged is that digital religion leads to a disembodied identity, that people’s engagement in digital religion happens only in the head and therefore contributes to a split between mind and body. The actual practice of these participants, however, suggests that they movefluidly between participation in both digital and“embodied”practices, as when Jews who participate in an online synagogue or digitally visit Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall also light Shabbat candles or participate in the Passover meal.

Erica Doss’s seminal study of how Elvis fans established“shrines”to the singer and drew on his image and lyrics as a source of comfort and meaning seemed shocking atfirst (1999). But now it seems commonplace to suggest that secular phenomena can assume sacred status for some people. Scholars explore the way the material of popular culture and the practices of fandom are used in conjunction with or in place of traditional religious elements. The Super Bowl, for instance, could be seen as a religious ritual engaged in by the entire US nation, or as a religion in and of itself, with rules and rituals for its adherents, both players and fans.

Evaluating consumption as a religious practice Recognizing that these practices of consumption are not as passive as some have suggested, it is still tempting to dismiss them as insubstantial, saying that surely they are not true forms of religion. However, we learn something about the boundaries of religion by attending to how these things are at least like religion. What does it mean when some of these prosumers describe their activity as religion or use religious language to describe it? It is said that the American novelist and humorist Mark Twain (1835–1910) was once asked whether he believed in infant baptism. Twain is supposed to have replied,“Believe in it?

Hell, I have seen it done.”However we judge the theological coherence of some of these practices, we must acknowledge, as Twain did, that we are aware of real people who regard their own practice as a legitimate form of religion.

Is religion so elastic a term that it encompasses all these variations, or are there distinctions to be made? In a provocative study of religious charlatans, David Chidester examines the way that items in popular culture such as baseball and Coca-Cola, andfigures as diverse as South African president Nelson Mandela and People’s Temple leader Rev. Jim Jones, whose followers participated in a mass suicide, take on the forms, language and images of religion (2005).

Chidester says that American popular culture has been a particularly rich loca- tion for such manifestations of the religious. He suggests that even false religion can give sacred structure to life in culture. This is a provocative suggestion, one that seems to expand what we mean by religion.

Some people question the meaning, utility, and value of these new forms of religion. They prefer to define religion more narrowly. In his book on celebrity culture,Gods Behaving Badly(2011), British scholar Pete Ward suggests a 44Religious identity in media cultures category that he calls“para-religion. ”He suggests that, while it is helpful to think of how celebrities are likegods and demi-gods, and while the attraction to them is a form of veneration, it is also useful to notice that there is no “ church ”of celebrity, that this veneration does not unify society as religion is said to do, nor do celebrities connect us to some ongoing chain of meaning. For Ward much of what is being discussed is not religion; rather it is like religion. Religion — or people ’s ideas about it —provides a sort of analogy for understanding something that is not quite religion. With his discussion of para-religion Ward protects the specialness of religion by excluding practices like the veneration of celebrities or the claiming of special powers for products like Coke. Thus he excludes what could be called “weak ”forms of religion that do not fully serve the cultural and individual purposes of religion. Ward ’s critics argue that the term religionshould be elastic enough to include both weak and strong expressions of religion, including even ephemeral and inchoate practices. This debate about the boundaries and de finitions of religion helps demonstrate more clearly what religion is, and the various things religion is doing in digital culture. Religion is an organizational category, a term we use to help us think about an incredibly diverse range of practices. In practice no one is “religious ”as such; rather, they have particular practices and beliefs that shape their orienta- tion toward life. They understand themselves to be Hindus, Jews, followers of Jim Jones, or perhaps fans of Elvis, or devotees of Coca-Cola. The actual practice of religion in daily life often blurs boundaries between what is and is not theoretically and/or traditionally considered religion. It is tempting to set the term religionaside for what we might think of as more serious forms of spiritual practice. Maybe the veneration of movies and celebrities is simply playing with the forms of religion. Where is the line between play with religion and actual religious practice? Think of Cathleen Falsani, the Evangelical blogger/Dudist priest described inChapter 2. Her playful engage- ment with the Coen Brothers character “The Dude ”is, along with Evangelical Christianity, integrated into her unique eclectic religious identity.

Transitory communities of practice Understanding religion in the media age requires attention to both long- established faith communities and emerging forms of practice, some of which may be transitory and some of which may result in established religious institutions. It is less than 40 years after Lucas ’s first film in the Star Warsseries, and so it is perhaps too soon to tell whether Jediism will stick or pass out of practice. That particular expressions of religion are transitory need not mean that they are without meaning or signi ficance. Are the roadside memorials that are common in Hispanic Catholic communities in the American Southwest and the spontaneous public memorials and rituals at places of tragic death insincere or ine ffective because they have not resulted in ongoing religious institutions or communities? Similarly, the establishment of physical or digital shrines to dead celebrities, the practices of fans who create their own narratives based on popular Believing and practicing in a digital world 45 material, and the reuse of digital culture in art and activism can be understood as means of establishing and expressing the religious self. Discussion questions 1 The author suggests that the Internet provides digital spaces within which people can practice religion. Do you agree or disagree, and why? What sort of religious practice is happening online today? How is this like and different from religion offline?

2 The chapter argues that in capitalist cultures consumption becomes an expression of identity and can be considered a source of religious meaning. Describe examples of this.

3 A common critique of consumption is that consumption is largely a passive activity through which powerful forces impose identity on consumers. What do youfind compelling about that argument? What counter-argument does the chapter develop? Do youfind it compelling?

What examples do you see?

4 Can celebrities or forms of popular culture take on religious meaning for people? On what grounds would you argue that this is religion? Is it helpful or problematic to make a distinction betweentruereligion andpara-religion? Why?

5 The reflections that follow consider examples of online religion. What do the religiousmommy bloggersstudied by Whitehead suggest about religious authority and community in today’s media culture? What do the studies of onlinepujathat Chiou examines suggest about the meaning of place, ritual and pilgrimage in religion today? References Becker, A.E., Burwell, R.A., Gilman, S.E., Herzog, D.B., and Hamburg, P. (2002)“Eating Behaviours and Attitudes following Prolonged Television Exposure among Ethnic Fijian Adolescent Girls,”The British Journal of Psychiatry, 180: 509–14.

Chidester, David (2005)Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture, Berkeley:

University of California Press.

deChant, Dell (2002)The Sacred Santa: Religious Dimensions of Consumer Culture, Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press.

Doss, Erika (1999)Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, and Image, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.

Freud, Sigmund (1908)“Creative Writers and Day Dreaming,”in Peter Gay, ed. (1989)The Freud Reader, New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Lofton, Kathryn (2011)Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, Berkley: University of California Press.

Mahan, Jeffrey (2004)“Talking aboutThe Passion of the Christ,”Lectionary Homiletics, Vol. XV, No. 4: 5–6, June/July.

Toffler, Alvin (1980)The Third Wave, New York: William Morrow and Company.

Ward, Pete (2011)Gods Behaving Badly: Media, Religion, and Celebrity Culture, Waco, TX:

Baylor University Press.

46Religious identity in media cultures Reflection Mom blogs and the religion of everyday life Deborah Whitehead A figure of 14 percent of all US mothers belong to the category of “mom bloggers, ”broadly de fined as “women who have at least one child in their household and have read or contributed to a blog in the past 30 days. ” According to a recent study, the average age of a mom blogger is 37, and they are statistically better educated, wealthier, and more politically involved and socially aware than the average American mother. There are currently approximately 4 million “mommy blogs ”in the United States. 1 Religious or faith-based mom blogs add religion and spirituality to the rich mix of topics considered by mom bloggers: pregnancy, parenting, marriage/family life, homemaking, crafting, cooking, finances/frugal living, etc. Evangelical Protestants and Mormons dominate the religious mom blog category, with a growing chorus of voices from Muslim, Jewish, Wiccan, pagan/earth spirituality, and atheist communities as well.

The popularity of mom blogs suggests two things about religion in digital space. First, just as mom blogs have revolutionized motherhood by making regular moms the authorities about parenting (rather than ivory tower academics and male doctors), religious mom bloggers constitute emerging authoritative voices on religion. These women write about religion out of their own everyday life experiences in highly personal and accessible ways. Evangelical Christian Angie Smith (http://angiesmithonline.

com) began her blog in 2008 while pregnant with her fourth child, who su ffered from fatal birth defects. The blog became a way to process her grief and re flect theologically through this painful experience, building a vibrant community of readers in the process. She came to see her blog as a narrative of her daughter Audrey ’s short life and also of God working through her experiences to minister to others, so that her readers too may “ become a part of the story that God is weaving us into. ” 2Mormon Stephanie Nielson (http://nieniedialogues.blogspot.com) has blogged since 2005 about how her faith gives meaning and purpose to her life as a wife and mother of five. Her readership and sense of purpose for her blog changed dramatically after she su ffered burns over 80 percent of her body in an airplane crash in 2008. When asked in a 2011 interview why her blog appealed to so many readers all over the world (nearly 5.5 million), she said:

I’ve had several emails from people who are atheists and they say, “ I sure feel something when I read your blog. ”It’s really brought di fferent faiths from all over together. It ’s just a story of faith and hope and a love story. There are di fferent people with di fferent ideals and faiths but this story just resonates because it ’s a story of God ’s hand. What it is is that they feel the Spirit. I ’m working through His hands. I ’m doing everything he tells me to do and I don ’t claim any of it. I ’m hoping to get people to come to Christ and be baptized.

I hope that through my words and my tragedy turned miracle turned wonderful story that people will see that there ’s a God, that ’s all. 3 This quote reveals the second way that religious mom blogs signify in digital spaces: they are a vehicle for personal religious testimony, particularly in traditions such as evangelical Protestantism and Mormonism, where testifying is a central part of one ’s faith and where blogging is encouraged as a way of giving testimony and spreading the faith. Both of these mom bloggers have developed audiences far beyond the blogosphere because of their powerful testimonies. Smith has launched a women ’s ministry through her blog, authoring three books and speaking at conferences across the United States. Nielson ’s blog proudly features links to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints ’offi cial website, teachings, and conferences, and she o ffers to send readers a free copy of the Book of Mormon. She has been featured in the “Mormon Message ”ad campaign, as well as on the Today ShowandOprah , and has authored a best-selling book about her recovery and her positive attitude toward life. Offering theological re flections out of the material of daily life, religious mom bloggers constitute a growing network of emerging authoritative voices about religion in digital space.

Notes 1Sam Laird, “The Rise of the Mommy Blogger, ”Mashable.com, May 8, 2012.

Available at: http://mashable.com/2012/05/08/mommy-blogger-infographic/; full report from Scarborough available at: www.scarborough.com/fs248584273/ Scarborough-Mom-Bloggers-Infographic.pdf; accessed March 30, 2013.

2Angie Smith, “The Beginning of the Story …,” Angie Smith/Bring the Rain blog, January 12, 2008. Available at: http://angiesmithonline.com/2008/01/the- beginning-of-the-story, accessed April 13, 2013.

3Stephanie Nielson, Interview, Conversations: Stephanie Nielson —Episode 26, Mormon Channel, available at www.mormonc hannel.org/conversations/26?lang=eng, accessed April 13, 2013. 48 Religious identity in media cultures Reflection Online pujaandpuja online: believing and practicing in a digital world Grace Chiou Hinduism is a complex and sensually rich religious practice that developed in the Indian subcontinent. It is known in the West as the source of yoga, for the concept of karma, and for its multiple deities and the rituals through which they are venerated. This ancient tradition provides a multifaceted case study in the mediation of religion online and o ffline and the resulting transitions in religious practice and authority. Puja is a Hindu worship ritual which involves making a number of o ff erings to a deity. Millions of Hindus perform this ritual regularly, which includes darshan, worshiping an image or murtiwhich is not understood as a likeness of a deity but as the god or goddess manifested and embodied, “deity itself taken form ”(Eck 1996: 38). Traditionally puja was performed in the home, or at temples, and often was part of a pilgrimage to historic Hindu sites. Today, a number of Hindu temples or teachers have responded to the digital age by o ffering online resources to facilitate the performance of puja. This happens in two ways.

First, when pujais practiced online, one gazes into the eyes of the murti on a screen rather than at a temple or shrine. While online pujamay o ffer adi fferent sensory experience, lacking the smells of incense or taste of food o fferings of pujarituals conducted at home or in a temple, the online format retains the emphasis and importance of “seeing ”and visuality that are rooted in the Hindu religious tradition. Diana Eck (1996) points to the “ power and importance of ‘seeing ’…not only must the gods keep their eyes open, but so must we in order to make contact with them, to reap their blessings and to know their secrets. ”Online pujahas occurred for more than a decade and if you do a Web search for “online puja”you will find many websites that have posted murtis(Figure 3.3).

Devotees gaze at the image on the Internet and see animated components of traditional puja. One can select options for honor o fferings such as water, leaves, flowers, or incense.

Alternatively, at some temple sites a devotee orders and pays online for the ritual to be completed on their behalf at a physical temple by a pujari or priest (Schei finger 2010). Purchasing pujato be done on one ’s behalf has been a traditional practice, and the concept of pujaonline is an extension of worship practiced on one ’s behalf which allows the diaspora to reconnect with“sacred homelands ”(Helland 2007). The Web ’s anony- mity expands worship possibilities to non-Hindus in cyberspace as the inner sanctum of a physical temple is typically o fflimits to non-Hindus or non-Indians (Schei finger 2010).

In addition, any seeker could either watch a live stream of pujaor read puja instructions written in English (Herman 2010). Thus, both online puja andpuja online are made accessible to non-Hindus via the Web.

Schei finger also discusses how pujaonline has altered hierarchical authority between temple authorities and pujarisand also between the puja providers and the temple. Whether practicing pujadigitally on an app or website, or ordered online, the Internet has broadened the social accessibility of pujabut posed o ffline challenges whereby traditional authorities are bypassed and pujaproviders are exercising authority.

References Eck, D. (1996) Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India , 2nd edition, New York:

Columbia University Press.

Helland, Christopher (2007) “Diaspora on the Electronic Frontier: Developing Virtual Connections with Sacred Homelands, ”Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication ,12.

Herman, P.K. (2010) “Seeing the Divine through Windows —Online Darshan and Virtual Religious Experience, ”Online —Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet , 4(1): 151 –78.

Schei finger, H. (2010) “Internet Threats to Hindu Authority: Puja-ordering Websites and the Kalighat Temple,”Asian Journal of Social Science , 38: 636–56.

Figure 3.3Puja with computer 50Religious identity in media cultures