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dc.contributor.authorStamper, Amber
dc.date.accessioned2020-05-27T18:59:10Z
dc.date.available2020-05-27T18:59:10Z
dc.date.issued2013-09-14
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1808/30385
dc.descriptionDigital Humanities Forum: Return to the Material. University of Kansas. September 14, 2013: http://idrh.ku.edu/dhforum2013

Amber Stamper is at Elizabeth City State University
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dc.description.abstractThe American evangelical church has historically existed as a material institution. As Great Awakening scholar Frank Lambert has argued, it was largely due to early revivalists’ eager efforts to mass print and distribute Bibles, tracts, spiritual autobiographies, and religious news-letters that the holy fervor of the movement spread so quickly throughout the colonies. In a frontier landscape where physical church buildings were often few and far between, new converts depended on material texts to provide spiritual education and sustenance as well as news of where preaching might be heard. Revivalists George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, Lorenzo Dow, and Charles Finney were all committed to the production of such materials to both support and disseminate the revival spirit, an effort that has come to typify the evangelical movement.

In later manifestations, evangelicals have displayed their commitment to the material through persistent engagement with the commercial marketplace. To every popular secular media form, evangelicals have provided a sacred counterpart, consistently working to offer potential converts and committed followers tangible stuffs representative of their spiritual lives. One need only peruse the extensive Christian book section of a Barnes & Noble to see the faces of evangelical pastors Billy Graham, T.D. Jakes, or Joyce Meyers garnishing myriad dust jackets, and evangelical book publishers regularly produce novels promoting their movement’s worldview in every genre from Western to Sci-Fi to Chick Lit. Evangelical clothing companies like N.O.W. (Not of this World) and merchandise from the popular W.W.J.D. bracelets of the nineties to evangelistic bumper stickers, toys, and stamped candies continue to play a central role in the development and expression of the movement.

As evangelicals have migrated to the Internet, however, this commitment to the material has necessarily evolved. And as with all prior engagements with mass media, evangelicals have proved fascinatingly adaptable: from the formation of virtual churches to the creation of prayer apps, digital Bibles, and Twitter mini-tracts, the traditional material forms of the movement have taken their own, unique digital shapes. In my presentation, I will explore this transformation, focusing particularly on how the digital has changed, complicated, or challenged the movement and its material culture. Drawing on the work of rhetoricians and communications and media scholars from Marshall McLuhan to Gail Hawisher, Cynthia Selfe, and Anne Wysocki, I will work from the theory that the medium of a message’s transmission deeply matters. Using the case study of LifeChurch.tv, an evangelical virtual church which corresponds to brick and mortar locations in Oklahoma, New York, Texas, Tennessee, and Florida, I will look at how material features of a traditional church have translated online. I will explore in particular how the church “space” is constructed, how the biblical text is transformed, how prayer and pastor-congregation interaction is enacted, and how conversion and conversion testimonies manifest and are documented in a digital world, attempting to—more broadly—apply these findings to questions of how the digital in myriad contexts—sacred or secular—might be said to transform material culture, ideology, and community.
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dc.relation.isversionofhttps://youtu.be/qmZwZjxuIusen_US
dc.subjectDigitalen_US
dc.subjectHumanitiesen_US
dc.subjectDigital Humanitiesen_US
dc.subjectPulpiten_US
dc.subjectEvangelicalism (Religion)en_US
dc.subjectReligionen_US
dc.titleFrom Pulpit and Pew to Pixels: American Evangelicals and the Digital Body of Christen_US
dc.typeVideoen_US
dc.rights.accessrightsopenAccessen_US


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