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People Seeking
People are trying to make sense of their lives; seeking answers to profound questions.
Seeking Faith
Sometimes these are questions of faith and belief.
Faith in the Information Age
Technology is changing culture often subtly. As culture changes so does the pursuit of faith.
Faith Endures
Yet faith remains, and the questions that people are seeking to answer persist.
Informing Faith
This is a blog about faithful people seeking answers, and the information they seek gather, and use to find their answers in the rapidly changing, yet unchanging information age.
So it's Saturday, Dec. 22nd. The World is still here (assuming the world didn't actually end, and then was replaced with a replica by the white mice but that's another story.)
There is something about apocalyptic prophecies that fascinate the Western consciousness. The most recent of course are Harold Camping's end of the world on May 21, 2012 (later amended to October 21st, 2012), and now the Mayan Calendar end on December 21st, 2012. I would have thought after May 21st online interest would wane but December 21st generated an even higher number of Google searches.
When you start looking at the Canadian search data you note that we paid little attention to the May 21st prophecies unlike our American neighbours, but we were very interested in Googling December 21st. Alberta and New Brunswick folks were searching "The End of the World", Saskatchewan and PEI focused on "Mayan Calendar", and La Belle Province was looking up "Fin du Monde."
This week I also noted Google's new project to digitize the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Israel Museum. This will open up the study of the original texts to a new generation of Bible and Religion scholars. Yes, we have had transcriptions and translations, but as my Old Testament Professor Gus used to say "Do you understand what the text actually looks like? Do you see the shape of the manuscript?" You can see hesitations in the script, erased characters, and even modified texts, that aren't apparent in transcription. My imagination conjures up images of the ancient scribe as he painstakingly and reverently copied his scroll. Hopefully, this digital archive will spark new avenues of research. One popular text is The War Scroll (1QM), popularly known as "The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness." The scroll builds on Biblical traditions of the End of Days from the Old Testament books of Daniel and Ezekiel. I don't doubt that this digital publication will also spark a new wave of interest in this text by amateur Biblical scholars and prophets; new fuel for the apocalyptically inclined.
The Internet is a powerful place to share belief, to engage with the faithful, and to ask difficult questions. Speculation also runs wild here, tapping into our deepest fears. We want to know what will happen next because we live in uncertain times. I admit to uncertainties about my own future direction as I weigh life's decisions. But on the big question "will the world be here tomorrow" that I can at least let go and not concern myself. My faith puts me at ease that I do know, as the old hymn says, Who holds the future. But I am fascinated with our quests online; we are hungry to know the unknowable. Mostly we are going off on our own little pilgrimages, but occasionally our journeys overlap in a big way, as this week when we collectively tried to pull aside the curtain, and take a peek at tomorrow. What will be the next nexus of faith online?
Photo credit: "Don't Panic", Patrick Hoesly, http://www.flickr.com/photos/zooboing/4637192255/
Boulder, Colorado...in January. No, I don't ski. I am told there is a great Sherpa restaurant in Boulder so that's on the itinerary.
So my proposal:
The Theology of Information Seeking: Understanding Church Leaders’ Source Selection
in a Digital World. I will argue that leaders cite theological orthodoxy as an important criterion for selection of information sources, but will then frequently cite materials outside of their own religious tradition. Baptist might use a Nazarene study guide online, or a Pentecostal a Mennonite video. This is certainly the case with online sources due to their convenience. Is there a contradiction here? And is there also a risk that these theologically diverse online media will undermine traditional authorities and create a hodge-podge stitched together faith? Bapta-costals and Menno-renes?
Perhaps not. When I look at the sources they cite closely, and how they use them, I am seeing a pattern. Leaders may not feel inhibited to "borrow" from those outside their faith community, as long as the borrowed bits still "fit" their church's teaching. So Pentecostals can borrow from Baptists the bits that fit Baptist doctrines, in part because they are both part of the same evangelical theological traditions. What I am not seeing is evangelicals borrowing from mainstream protestant or catholic traditions. These are outside of their theological family. Do those boundaries exist for other traditions? I am also fascinated when diverse religious groups use the same secular materials. Are these safe because they are non-theological?
So things to do: finish the paper, get my air ticket, and buy wooly socks.
So says the Harold Camping of Family Radio ministries, a Conservative Christian evangelistic ministry. Important to Christian theology is the idea of the end things ("eschatology"), whether it be "what happens when I die?", "what happens to the world?", "is there a heaven?", or "is there a hell?" The Bible says alot about end things. These are important faith questions. The danger arises when answering those questions becomes the consuming passion, and not living out our faith. Perhaps Harold Camping is sincere and convinced. Tomorrow he will be a very disappointed man.
Judgment Day prophets have been around for a very long time. In fact, the Gospel of John records that end time speculation started even before Jesus' death! There have been lots of end time predictions through history, and many times people have climbed mountains to wait...and wait...and wait. I'm amazed by how the media has picked this up. Why the fascination with this End Times prophet? Is it just a warmup for the Mayan/Nostradamus 2012 End-of-the-World prophecies? There is certainly a public taste for this coverage, and it is interesting to watch the twitter posts as people confidently (?) proclaim that the world isn't ending. MTV is suggesting top five movies for end of the world, the Washington Post is predicting good weather for the end of days, and CNN suggests a last meal at your favourite restaurant. A little bit of a circus, but it is a fascinating religious phenomenon (sorry, had to!)
I'm an evangelical Christian, and I believe in Judgment Day. I believe a time will come when God will say "Enough!" "Enough cruelty. Enough killing. Enough destroying this creation I once called 'very good'." I need to believe in a God who will one day bring justice to an injustice world, re-make the world as it was to be in the beginning. I think that is the point of Biblical prophecy; not to provide a road-map/checklist for the end times, but to give struggling people hope that even when if seems darkest, God is still there, and one day He will say enough.
So I will mow my lawn today, and get groceries. Maybe new sneakers. Or I guess I could wait til tomorrow. ;-)
It wasn't so long ago I using telnet on dialup to access the library catalogue. Can you remember back pre-internet? We phoned people, even wrote letters...on paper...with stamps! No email. No Youtube. Not even google. This week Egypt went back to the pre-Internet days when the government pulled the plug of internet and cell networks to quell protests. In Canada we have the CRTC decision which might mean the end of unlimited internet downloads. Just when iTunes and Netflix started having more to watch than cable. Coincidence?
Life is become entangled with the internet these days. I've been thinking of the churches that have enthusiastically adopted technology. New forms of church have been created that exist because of the internet. What would happen if the internet went away?
It would hard to go back, but as the people of Egypt quickly discovered there are other ways to spread the message. And churches have been very adept at using media to communicate long before the internet. Back in the 1940s Billy Graham's radio program "Hour of Decision", in the 1950s he moved to television and film. Film has long been important to communicate faith. In Mediating Religion there is an interesting essay that described the Roman Catholic church's congress on film in 1928, and notes the first papal encyclical Vigilanti Cura on cinema and social communication was issued in 1936! Though email is supplanting it, many churches still have the phone prayer chain to spread announcements to their members faster than any shampoo commercial! It never ceased to amaze me how fast news spread in my country pastorates; we'd have a church meeting in one village, and before I arrived in the next village everyone seemed to know what happened at the meeting. Beat that twitter!
I wouldn't want to give up the internet; but the world wouldn't end either.
Many Christians find the practice of daily devotional reading important for their spiritual development. Since 1956 an evangelical Christian ministry Radio Bible Class has produced a little booklet called "Our Daily Bread" that includes a daily Bible reading and related inspirational thought. Other popular devotional booklets are "The Upper Room" (1935) and the Roman Catholic publication "The Word Among Us" (1981). There have been "Daily Breads" around our house since I was a child, and they remain a helpful tool for worship and reflection. Media has changed, and I was interested to see that these ministries have enthusiastically adopted new media to communicate their message. You can still get "Our Daily Bread" in booklet form, but also as a streaming audio, podcast, mobile download, RSS or Twitter Feed.
What caught my attention was the tag cloud built of descriptive terms (tags) associated with each devotional and "weighted" based of popularity of that tag. Like the tag list I have on my blog except theirs is much cooler. These tags are actually assigned by the author, and as such aren't really "social tags" where the readers, not the author, decides what the devotional is "about" and tags it accordingly.
It is interesting to see the very different tags in this floating cloud. I was wondering how the tags would be different if I tagged the devotionals or if you did. I was looking at the tags for the devotional on October 22, 2009; I would have chosen some of them, but others seemed too abstract or theological. Who are they for? Faith is very personal; I would think that the tags would tell you as much about me as they likely would about the devotionals. Maybe I'll need to suggest social tagging to the folks at "Our Daily Bread."
Sorry couldn't resist! I've been busy for a while and have neglected my posting but someone pointed this article out and I just had to share. Increasingly larger churches with satellite campuses are turning to linked video conference to share services. Locally Stoneridge Fellowship Church in Sackville, NS is using this technology with its first satellite church in Hubbards, NS and hopes to plant more of these distance campuses. As I understand it, some aspects of the service like worship are local and other parts like preaching as shared experiences.
But looking at a big screen still seems...um..maybe impersonal. But wait technology to the rescue. A recent article in Out of Ur online mag discusses the use of holographic technology to bring the pastor virtually in your midst. Is it realistic? Check out the pic below; one of these pastors is not really there.
We went to Pier21 immigration museum yesterday. For those of you who haven't been there it chronicles the history of immigration to Canada through the experience of this one entry point. There is a multimedia presentation using holograms that is older technology but is still striking. What if it was realtime? What if it were interactive? What if you could manipulate the image so pastor could drop a few pounds? Sorry...the photoshop possibilities are amazing. :)
I went to see Jim Carey's "A Christmas Carol" and was inspired to re-read the book. The movie seemed to be undecided whether it was to be a literal interpretation of the original Dickens story or something new (and Jim Carey-ish.) A good movie but not the same as the book. I've been thinking a lot about the debate between the print and new media in religion.
The peoples of the Book (Muslims, Jewish and Christians) have an text centered faith rooted respectively in the Koran, Tanakh, and Christian Bible each sharing significant Torah traditions. I'm interested (at present) in my research with Christian protestant evangelicalism and its use of information. In this theological tradition, there is an idea of a "received text" that is divinely inspired and canonically fixed (the church believes it was now closed and could no longer be edited, or added to.) There is also the belief in the inherent power of the words of scripture. This dominance of the text is strongly evident in the evangelical church where even decorative features in churches tend to be "text heavy." Information = written text. There have been challenges to this idea. I think back to the use of stained glass windows during the middle ages to educate and inspire largely illiterate church goers in the stories of Scripture. I remember reading some years ago (1985, I think) Frankie Schaeffer's book " Addicted to Mediocrity" where he challenged evangelicals to take the creative arts seriously as a form of faith expression capable to educating, inspiring and evangelizing. Time has moved on and we now live in a multi-media rich environment, often amateur driven. Faith is being expressed in these forms. Will spoken word begin to take predominance over the written text? It is happening with other forms of written communication (i.e. newspapers). How will this substitution in form change the evangelical theology around the primacy of the text? What about other forms of visual media? One of the first tasks of Christian missionaries among new people groups was literacy training. Besides aiding community development, teaching literacy also meant people could read the Bible. It was an essential part of faith development. Now one sees the widespread use of video dramatization of the Bible for evangelism.
So my question of the day:if the Bible was being created today, would God have used multimedia or is there something about written text?
I am fascinated by the people side of information. I am the Public Services Librarian at the Sir James Dunn Law Library, Schulich School of Law. I hold an Interdisciplinary PhD from Dalhousie in Human Information Behaviour, and Sociology of Religion and New Media.
Posts
12/22/2012 07:18:00 PM
David Michels
