MERGE digital religion & gender

MERGE project: the what, why, who, where, when, and how of a project studying Catholic social movements and gender discourses on social media #Catholicism #MarieCurie #MSCActions #MSCA #gender #SocialMedia 👇

Interestingly, when I started my PhD I have learned that some people watch this movie as a type of Easter "ritual" (I believe that I read it in the book "Religion in the Media Age" by my mentor Stewart Hoover).

Happy Easter with today's watching suggestion: Jesus Christ Superstar, one of my favorite musicals, and great movie!

Second, the founders of the field, and I want to mention Heidi Cambpell in particular, are women Third, as scholars, I don't think we need to shy away from potential controversial terms, but try to engage with them

Why choosing a term that is so controversial in many political and educational context? First, thinking of gender helps us with an intersectional lens that consider all power struggles

This year's Digital Religion Yearbook is now freely available at: oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/items/bd30b028… 0f2440ff1817 Edited by your truly, the Yearbook is a publication from the Network for New Media, Religion, and Digital Culture. This year, I decided to focus on gender.

A "Top 10" list of innovative work covering AI, algorithmic imaginaries, and religious influencers. Under the direction of field founder Dr. Heidi Campbell, the NNMDC bridges the gap between technology and religion. Read the full Yearbook here: oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/items/bd30b028…

This year's volume includes: An Annual Essay by Dr. Kristin Peterson on digital meaning-making among Muslim and Christian feminists. The 2025 Digital Religion Research Award winner, Kathrin Trattner, exploring the digital agency of Catholic feminist activists.

The Network for New Media, Religion & Digital Culture Studies (NNMDC) announces the release of The Digital Religion Yearbook 2025. I am the editor of this fifth edition, which highlights groundbreaking research with a strategic focus on gender and the women shaping the field.

Follow my project @mergeproject2023 on Instagram and help me get to 500!

In places like Italy and Germany, you can devolve part of the taxes to support certain religions In places like UK and Sweden, there are state churches. Do you come from a place where there is separation of church and state, or not?

they have theology departments in public universities and clergy members are paid by the state. And are the other European countries secular? Not always...

Is Europe secular? I have been in Strasbourg for a talk and discovered something interesting: At the very heart of European secularism, France, the regions of Alsace and Lorraine (which used to be German before WWI) have a different regulation of religion:

Talking about women priests at the ReligiS project in Strasbourg

This year's winner: Trattner, K. (2024). Between Feminist Solidarity and “Bible-Verse-Throwers”: Catholic Feminist Activists on Social Media and Experiences of Agency. Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture, 13(2), 246–268. doi.org/10.1163/216592…

Every year the Network for New Media, Religion, and Digital Culture (digrel.com) chooses one article that offers some innovative approaches to the field of digital religion.

Tomorrow in Strasbourg I’ll discuss methods to study digital religion

You can, in the sense that you can create a schism like Henry VIII, or ask for an annulment if there are reasons, or simply divorce civilly. But divorced people who remarry cannot take communion, and this is something that some progressive Catholics wants to change.

Can Catholics divorce? I'm asking this question while listening to Sal Da Vinci's song "per sempre si", which will be the Italian entry to this year's Eurovision. The song is about religious marriage, which is "forever". But can you divorce from a Catholic wedding?

Tomorrow is the deadline for the #EUARE conference in Rome, do you want to submit something on Digital Religion?

Also, I disagree with his recent political ideas, especially regarding Israel, but I cannot help admiring his writing Not sure where he is now, but I'm picturing him somewhere filling Adorno in with the happenings of the last 50 years...

Many scholars criticizes this idea of the public sphere and I see a lot of potential pitfalls in Habermas' work, but nonetheless I believe his thinking is so fascinating.

MERGE reading suggestion Habermas, J. (1962). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. The MIT Press. With Jürgen Habermas passing we lost such a huge intellectual.