"Researching Theo(b)logy" Published

My copy of Exploring Religion and the Sacred in a Media Age came in the post this morning! Look out for Ellen Moore's really interesting chapter on American evangelical churches' responses to The Da Vinci Code. My chapter is called, "Researching Theo(b)logy: A Participatory Research Methodology for the Blogosphere."



I write about the use the emerging church milieu make of two Internet-based technological innovations (blogs and wikis). After documenting the difficulties in using these texts (see my chapter in Reading Spiritualities in relation to the nature of online text) as sources of data, I suggest the benefits for researchers of having a research-specific blog (particularly for researchers looking at the Internet) and reflect on the practical and ethical issues involved in such a participatory methodology.

By chance, there's an interesting article in this quarter's Network (the newsletter of the British Sociological Association) on "Blogology," by Rebecca Leach (Keele University). She writes, 'The blog is hugely underused by sociologists as a means of communication... This is a real shame because blogs can give the public a real flavour of our research and writing much quicker than any other published output... A rich stream of new and interesting thinking can be found in the blogs of the many PhD students who creatively link together their academic ideas with their personal, political and cultural lives' (p.18). Rebecca's article includes links to A (Budding) Sociologist's Commonplace Book, Global Sociologist and a Very Public Sociologist - all with cooler names than my blog. Hey ho.

Maybe Fieldwork in Religion (see post here) would be a good place to further reflect on how my research blog is going? Obviously, the posts here at OpenSourceResearch form a cumulative reflection on this methodology but (as I originally wrote the chapter that appears in Exploring Religion and the Sacred in a Media Age in April 2007 - with some revisions over the year) it is now much more common for academics (particularly PhD students) to have research-related blogs. It would be interesting to explore if and how these blogs have encouraged participation from their research subjects.

Researching Theo(b)logy

Exploring Religion and the Sacred in a Media Age is now available for pre-order at Amazon.co.uk. It will be published at the end of February 2009, and contains chapters on a range of case studies from interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks. Edited by Dr. Chris Deacy (University of Kent) and Dr. Elizabeth Arweck (University of Warwick), it collects essays that were presented at the 2007 conference on Religion, Media and Culture. My contribution is methodological, mainly due to the point at which I was at with my thesis, reflecting on the use the global emerging church milieu make of blogs and wikis and suggesting a participatory research methodology for research into the blogosphere. Here's the blurb from Amazon.co.uk:

"In recent years, there has been growing awareness across a range of academic disciplines of the value of exploring issues of religion and the sacred in relation to cultures of everyday life. Exploring Religion and the Sacred in a Media Age offers inter-disciplinary perspectives drawing from theology, religious studies, media studies, cultural studies, film studies, sociology and anthropology. Combining theoretical frameworks for the analysis of religion, media and popular culture, with focused international case studies of particular texts, practices, communities and audiences, the authors examine topics such as media rituals, marketing strategies, empirical investigations of audience testimony, and the influence of religion on music, reality television and the internet. Both academically rigorous and of interest to a wider readership, this book offers a wide range of fascinating explorations at the cutting edge of many contemporary debates in sociology, religion and media, including chapters on the way evangelical groups in America have made use of The Da Vinci Code and on the influences of religion on British club culture and electronic dance music."

Reading Spiritualities Published

Stemming from a Lancaster University conference a couple of years back, my supervisor Dr. Deborah F. Sawyer and fellow PhD student Dawn Llewellyn have collected several papers together to form a publication entitled Reading Spiritualities: Constructing and Representing the Sacred.


Here's some blurb: "The phenomenon of 'sacred text' has undergone radical deconstruction in recent times, reflecting how religion has broken out of its traditional definitions and practices, and how current literary theories have influenced texts inside the religious domain and beyond. "Reading Spiritualities" presents both commentary and vivid examples of this evolution, engaging with a variety of reading practices that work with traditional texts and those that extend the notion of 'text' itself. The contributors... open up understandings of where and how 'sacred texts' are emerging and being reassessed within contemporary religious and spiritual contexts; and make room for readings where the spiritual resides not only in the textual, but in other unexpected places... [The book] offers a unique and well-focussed 'snapshot' of the textual constructions and representations of the sacred within the contemporary religious climate - accessible to the general reader, as well as more specialist interests of students and researchers working in the crossover fields of religious, theological, cultural and literary studies."


And the table of contents:

• "Introduction," Deborah F. Sawyer and Dawn Llewellyn
• "Getting a/cross god: An Interview with Michèle Roberts," Michèle Roberts, Dawn Llewellyn and Deborah F. Sawyer
• "The Sacred in Caribbean Literature: A Theological Conversation," Michael N. Jagessar
• "Dramatic Improvisation: A Jazz Inspired Approach to Undertaking Theology with the Marginalized," Anthony G. Reddie
• "‘Gendering the Spirit’: Reading Women’s Spiritualities with a Comparative Mirror," Ursula King
• "Our Sacred Texts: Literature, Theology and Feminism," Heather Walton
• "The Desire for Interactivity and the Emerging Texts of the Blogosphere," Katharine Sarah Moody
• "Spiritual Themes and Identities in Chicana Texts: The Virgin of Guadalupe as a Role Model for Womanhood," María Antonia Álvarez
• "Bihishti Zewar: A Text for Respectable Women?" Raana Bokhari
• "Forming Community in the Third Wave: Literary Texts and Women’s Spiritualities," Dawn Llewellyn
• "Solomon’s Narrative: Architecture, Text and the Sacred," Ozayr Saloojee
• "Reading Texts, Watching Texts: Mythopoesis on Neopagan Websites," Maria Beatrice Bittarello
• "Word and Image: Burgess, Zeffirelli, and Jesus the Man of Nazareth," Graham Holderness
• "Do Not Hide Your Face From Me: The Sacred and Profane Body in Art and Modern Literature," David Jasper

My chapter, "The Desire for Interactivity and the Emerging Texts of the Blogosphere," focuses upon the ways in which the UK emerging church milieu (when I wrote the paper I was using the language of "emerging Christian communities") use online texts, particularly blogs, from the perspective of recent literary theory. I've blogged about it before - here - but wanted to draw attention to it again now we've gone to print!

Paul T.

I went to London for the day yesterday to meet up with Paul Teusner from the School of Applied Communications at RMIT University, Melbourne, whose research into Australian emerging church blogs I've been following for the last couple of years. It was great to meet him in person and to spend a good number of hours chatting about our work and lives. Paul had a camera handy to "pap" me outside Buckingham Palace but I didn't - so I had to steal this one from his online CV. If you want to see me displaying my transcribing injuries follow this link.

Paul's research explores how emerging church bloggers in Australia are constructing individual religious identities, how the Australian blogosphere networks to collectively determine emerging church identity online, and how these online constructions impact the offline identity of the Australian emerging church. His research site is here.

Paul has just been to the Association of Internet Researchers' conference in Copenhagen, "Rethinking Community, Rethinking Place," and for the first time there were a good number of researchers working on religion. Among them a few people I met at the "Religion, Media and Culture: Exploring Religion and the Sacred in a Media Age" conference in Oxford last April: Heidi Campbell, Mia Lovheim, and Tim Hutchings. Heidi recently launched a research wiki called Studying Religion and New Media. You can find the PowerPoints for Paul's papers ("Web 2.0 Rhetoric and Realities: Authority, Technorati and Religious Bloggers" and "Religious Podcasting: In Between Religious Audiences and Podcasting Communities") here and here. The paper I wrote for the Oxford conference is scheduled to be published in a book Exploring Religion and the Sacred in a Media Age mid-January.

It was great to talk with Paul about the differences between the Australian emerging church and the UK emerging church milieu, and interesting to hear more about the conservative emphases of Christianity (and politics) in Australia. It seems like the OZ emerging church milieu is more theologically conservative and often prefers to articulate its identity in the language of mission and missional to distinguish it from the US emerging church milieu and particularly Emergent Village. Paul met Pete Rollins a while back in Melbourne and it was great to hear a bit about reactions to what Pete and ikon are about. Once we got bored of our theses and moaning about the inner workings of postgrad life, we chatted about Neighbours (of course), horror movies and zombies, Simon Pegg, Brighton, and the pains of not really knowing where we're going to fit when we've submitted. We'll see, eh?

Blogs and New Text Values

I've just finished (what I hope will be!) the final draft of a chapter that will be published in a book entitled, Reading Spiritualities and, having just regained Internet access after moving house, I thought I'd try to whet some appetites! I blogged briefly about this before here.

The book is being edited by my PhD supervisor, Dr Deborah F. Sawyer, and another PhD student of hers, Dawn Llewellyn, and came out of a conference they organised in 2006, Women Reading Spiritualities. Although I gave a paper based on my Masters research among LGBT Christians, I've written something more directly related to my PhD thesis for inclusion in this volume.

My chapter is called, "The Desire for Interactivity and the Emerging Texts of the Blogosphere" and looks at blogging among emerging Christian communities in order to reflect on the nature of blogs as texts. The chapter argues that the desire for interactivity, identified by feminist literary theorist Lynn Pearce in all reading practices, can be most clearly seen in the reading practices surrounding blogging, as this often results in textual interactions which are articulated in the comments section or in a reader's own blog. There are several values associated with text by postmodern literary theorists which can also be seen in the blogosphere. However, I reflect on the nature of authorship and authority in the blogosphere, and make some arguments regarding a disparity between these "new text values" and text in the blogosphere. I hope someone will find it an interesting read!

The Blogging Emerging Church

I'm giving a paper tomorrow to the Religious Studies postgraduate community, presenting some thoughts on blogs as authoritative texts for emerging Christian communities. It's a prelude to a chapter I'm composing for a forthcoming collection called Reading Spiritualities edited by fellow Lancastrians Deborah F. Sawyer and Dawn Llewellyn.


I'm exploring notions of authorship in the blogosphere, in conjunction with some thoughts on authority. I'm using data from a Technorati search for "emerging church" blogs (dated June 18 2007) to problematise this way of defining and measuring blog 'authority.' At the moment, in the chapter, I also aim to investigate author (blogger) demographics and comment on whether or not a hierarchy of literature is present among emerging Christian bloggers. In the future, I might attempt to teach myself Social Network Analysis to map linking patterns through the emerging corner(s) of the blogosphere and to identify 'authorities' and 'hubs.' But that's beyond my thesis at the moment, I think!


I've found Cameron Marlow's work a great starting point for thinking about these issues, as well as several pieces by Lilia Efimova et al on defining blog communities. Studying the discursive constructions of what a 'blog' is, Mathieu O'Neil identified LiveJournal-bashing in the blogosophere, and Susan Herring et al found offline sexism and ageism was being unintentionally transfered online. These issues of authorship and authority in the blogosphere are tangential to my PhD, so I'm pretty much out of my depth yet trying to learn how to swim. I'll post more on these topics as I move from this working paper towards the chapter.

Researching Theo(b)logy

Modifying a phrase from Tony Jones, I gave a paper entitled "Researching Theo(b)logy" at a Conference in Oxford last month about my research with emerging Christian communities, reflecting on methodological issues for research in the blogosphere.

I'm exploring the on- and offline theorisings of individuals and communities involved in a critical conversation between Christianity and culture. Radical Orthodoxy maintains that all Christian theorisings should be 'theological' (Milbank 2006) and 'confessional' (Smith 2004); i.e. they should be grounded in the Christian narrative of creation, fall, redemption and consummation. Therefore, following the insights of RO, but alluding to the medium in which many of contemporary Christians' theorisings are being explored, I refer to this subject matter as “theo(b)logy.”

I reflect on the methodological difficulties of conducting research in the blogosphere, including: locating blogs, measuring blog validity, and measuring blog influence. However, I also argue for a participatory research methodology for the blogosphere which uses the opportunities provided by the Internet to increase the levels of participation open to research participants themselves.

This is the paper in which I suggest that a research-specific blog (a la Bryan Murley) is beneficial for research projects on the blogosphere. The responses to this suggestion gave me the confidence to start this research blog of my own.

It was a great conference, with fascinating papers from Lynn Schofield-Clark on Fashion Bibles like Revolve, Tom Beaudoin on fandom, and Nick Couldry on media rituals. I want to be a lecturer in Christianity and culture.