Religious Studies

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This paper aims to demonstrate that artifacts are rhetorical texts that can communicate or persuade, according to different contexts in which they are presented. It begins with the assumption that objects don’t have a specific meaning immanently embedded in their materiality. Instead, meaning is the articulation of relations that engage people with the object according to historical contexts, places, times, events, and a dynamic relationship between writers and audiences. Therefore, texts and objects don’t convey a single significance, but multiple possibilities. Their “reading” is the result of a set of decisions and a network of circumstances that create distinctive meanings, which can exist only in a particular reading experience. Accordingly, this project investigates how objects change their social, cultural, and political discourse according to the articulation of rhetorical situation, audience, and the exigence in which they are immersed. To do that, I examine two distinct cases of placement, displacement, and replacement of objects that consequently transform their discourse and significance. The first is described by Richard Davis in Lives of Indian Images (1997) where he writes a biography of many Hindu images moving from one cultural context to another. In the second instance, David Morgan (2011) examines a late eighteenth and early nineteenth century encounter between Protestant missionaries and Polynesians. Moreover, my investigation scrutinizes religious and rhetorical materiality for its conceptual, historical, and intellectual development.

This paper demonstrates how mobile technologies in the first half of the twentieth century - portable radio, the postal system, and transportation networks – helped to create a religious soundscape that stretched far beyond churches and small communities. Instead of disconnecting people from their own places, mobile media linked them to a domestic, nostalgic, and idealized Christian environment by creating new forms of audience experience. This paper applies the “mobility paradigm” to the radio show “Old Fashioned Revival Hour,” first broadcast in 1937 by Charles E. Fuller and his wife, Grace Payton Fuller. Fuller’s program evoked childhood memories and the familiar sensation of church services for people on the move, in cars, trains, and ships. One segment of his show featured letters sent by audience members, whose accounts documented the place of the new portable medium in the random formation of ephemeral audiences. These letters demonstrate how radio promoted a new sense of extended community in the face of the progress of technology and the dislocation of traditional social arrangements by intensifying urbanization.

Media technologies not only pervade commerce and communication, but seep into the very means of perception and the structures of consciousness. For example, Aristotle compared the state of an empty mind to a “tabula rasa.” Psychologist and hypnosis researcher Joseph Delboeuf stated that the “soul is a notebook of phonographic recordings.” It is common to hear people say that their dreams were “as real as a movie.” In every case, the understanding of the soul and the mind are cast in the mold of contemporary media. The way we think and experience the world owes to the materiality of current technological media and the way they process and record information.
Likewise, scientology and its method (dianetics) were shaped by the advent of a medium: the computer. In 1952, the e-meter, a new electronic device, bolstered L. Ron Hubbard’s claim for the scientific exactitude of dianetics. Scientology claimed that the control of all functions of the central nervous system could be reduced to the analogy of a computer hard drive, from which hidden and lost data could be finally retrieved. The electrical and religious device worked by unveiling the hidden sources of mental disturbances and psychosomatic illnesses registered inside the human body. Hubbard announced that the e-meter was the most important tool of his religion. Consequently, the instrument was not just optional, but an indispensable part of the core principle around which scientology was constructed. The device shaped the way the client experienced scientology’s therapeutic intervention in aesthetic and material terms.
Although Hubbard acknowledged many influences in the formation of scientology, he failed to acknowledge the field of cybernetics, computer science and its rhetoric, popular film, and science fiction. Each of these shaped his understanding of the power of the e-meter as a technological medium for his religious therapy. This paper will argue its case by examining the role of the e-meter in scientology and exploring what many scholars are now understanding to be the constitutive role that technologies play in religion—not as something extrinsic to religion, but as organic ingredient in religious experience.

This paper investigates how categories of sins are established at online confessions websites. For Michel Foucault, “confession” is more than only revealing a sin: it is a social symptom to be scrutinized. Confessions are part of the apparatus called “technology of the self:” a mechanism for disciplining behaviors and bodies. If what is confessed is considered morally wrong, confessions relate to a broad set of norms, rules, and personal codes that permeate society. But practices, notions, rules, norms, and concepts are not constant. By conducting a historical investigation of the practice of traditional confession, online observation of three different websites (Noteful.com, E-admit.com, and Sinr.com), and quantitative analysis, this study inquires how the traditional practice of verbalizing and classifying what is considered a sin is being reshaped or translated in the digital environment.

This article describes a content analysis employed to investigate how ethnic museum websites visually construct ethnic identity and represent cultural heritage.  In focusing on websites, this study faced the challenge of capturing digital data and conducting analysis in a form of communication characterized by dynamism, multimedia, and multimodality. In order to undertake this project, both qualitative and quantitative content analysis were used. The study looked at 43 websites of museums located in the United States. This case specially demonstrates the advantages and problems of combining qualitative and quantitative methods in the visual analysis of websites.

The study combines qualitative and quantitative content analysis to explore the websites of 43 ethnic museums in the United States. The use of multimodal communication to represent ethnic identity and cultural heritage is detailed. Also delineated is how websites present relationships with the ethnic diaspora, the homeland, the museums’ local communities, and the U.S. community.

This article investigates how ethnic museum websites in the United States use visual and textual resources to communicate their ideas of memory, past, and ethnic identity. Cultural intermediaries create such websites to foster identification between the cultural institutions and their stakeholders. By using social semiotic theory and content analysis, the article demonstrates how museums act as a medium for representing collective memory and, therefore, construct identities that are not static, but in a constant process of adaptation according to different contexts. This study of 43 websites concludes that ethnic museum websites pursue either nostalgic or present-time message strategies to represent cultural memory: the ethnic past and the ethnic now. The ethnic past aims to display an idealized past that is fixed and forever gone. In contrast, the ethnic now uses culturally identifiable features to convey movement, fluidity, transformation, reinterpretation, and the re-invention of ethnic identity.

This paper investigates the groundwork upon which the concepts of mediatization and mediation were erected, focusing on the very definition of what media-technology is. These concepts frame the conversation among scholars in the study of religion and media. However, despite the fact that the two keywords share the same root, media, they are understood as incompatible with one another. On the one hand, mediatization is broadly defined as a historical shift in which the logic of mass media transforms traditional forms of religion, subsuming them under the imperative of the modern marketplace. On the other hand, scholars studying the mediation of religion affirm that media have always shaped and transformed religious practices. This investigation argues that the controversy between the two modes of analysis does not consist of whether or to what extent media technology affects or transforms religion. Rather, the conflict arises from how media technology is defined.

This study explores the intersections between facework, feedback inter- ventions, and digitally mediated modes of response to student writing. Specifically, the study explores one particular mode of feedback interven- tion—screencast response to written work—through students’ percep- tions of its affordances and through dimensions of its role in the mediation of face and construction of identities. Students found screencast technologies to be helpful to their learning and their interpretation of positive affect from their teachers by facilitating personal connections, creating trans- parency about the teacher’s evaluative process and identity, revealing the teacher’s feelings, providing visual affirmation, and establishing a con- versational tone. The screencast technologies seemed to create an evaluative space in which teachers and students could perform digitally mediated pedagogical identities that were relational, affective, and dis- tinct, allowing students to perceive an individualized instructional pro- cess enabled by the response mode. These results suggest that exploring the concept of digitally mediated pedagogical identity, espe- cially through alternative modes of response, can be a useful lens for theoretical and empirical exploration.

This paper investigates how Creationism mobilizes natural objects as rhetorical agents in order to turn the Book of Genesis into an account of scientific truth. I show how this is done by comparing two different networks, in which the brute facts of nature (ice, water, rocks, fossils, etc.) are assembled according to two different worldviews and made to produce different “truths.” One network is oriented by the principles of modern geology and the other one by the principles of Creation Science. Creationists rearrange the mass of geologic and paleontological data that constitutes the “evolution network ” with two main rhetorical purposes. The first move aims to weaken the network that supports evolutionary theory in order to discredit the hegemonic scientific scheme. The second move aspires to replace evolution with another network, one that conceived to demonstrate the accuracy of the biblical record.
My analysis draws on Actor-Network Theory combined with the concepts of material rhetoric developed by Kenneth Burke. By comparing Protestant and scientific accounts, I hope to show that what changes in these two different networks is precisely the agency of assembled agents, or “actants.” Creationism, inspired by Scottish Realism, conceives that all matter is dead and inert, which subjugates its role to divine intervention. According to Creationists, by attributing evolutionary skills – self-determination - to the brute facts of nature, evolutionists deny the power of God over nature. If Creationism cannot be considered a science, it is not because it fails to follow the four features that Robert K. Merton described as the normative structure of science (as US courts have ruled in cases against Creation Science). It is because all the material actants of its network rhetorically work as witnesses to God’s existence. In short, what makes Creationism religion is its concept of materiality.
The relevance of this project for the study of religion and material rhetoric bears on how the study of networks reveals how both science and Creationist thought construct facts and interpret material objects as evidence for their respective accounts.