How do we deal with the ever-evolving nature of digital religion and its many expressions? The papers in this panel all grapple with how to build, assess and derive new insights from digital archives. Authors consider the in-built biases of computational analysis and newspaper databases, how we manage digital archives created by religious organizations, and digital objects that manage affect around racial reckoning.
This paper thinks critically about the violence of digital archives and computational methods by engaging with the role they play in the erasure and flattening of marginal communities, advocating for a deceleration of digital archives. I place my methodological pitfalls from a computational project against the important theoretical work of archivist Dorothy Berry, art historian Jennifer Roberts, and scholars engaged in a post-colonial study of religion like Saba Mahmood and Tomoko Masuzawa to demonstrate the urgency of deceleration to prevent the further disenfranchisement of marginal communities. Reflecting on a computational project I conducted using Seventh-day Adventist periodicals on religious liberty from 1886 to 1919 to analyze positive rhetoric about the Catholic Church, I describe how my project and its shortcomings serve as a low-stakes example of the power in decelerating digital archives, and I use it to speak to the much higher stakes of digital work that involve marginal communities.
Media related to monks in Thailand provide much material for assembling digital archives. This presentation describes the use of monastic media within Thai popular culture to create two digital archives: 1) pictures of famous monks from temples and practitioners meant to generate faith, and 2) social media images of monks engaged in inappropriate behavior. I describe the process of selecting the photographs for these archives, and my research process, which involves collecting opinions and feelings from lay Buddhist focus group participants. In analyzing the opportunities and challenges of this methodology, I argue that archives derived from popular culture constitutes a way to easily receive comments and feedback from participants, providing a snapshot in time of a religious field, and a way to visually represent a research topic. I also look to future challenges creating a home for a publicly accessible digital archive of Buddhist monastic aesthetics.
This paper examines grief within white Christian discourse about antiblack violence in the United States. Drawing from Sara Ahmed’s notion of affective economies, the paper tracks how grief—or an absence of grief—surfaces and conceptualizes “grief reminders” as a pastoral practice of affective conditioning and realignment. I argue that “grief reminders” occur when a faith leader identifies grief as both a necessary response to loss and as a theological and ethical imperative for the proper practice of faith. The paper interrogates how grief reminders work as affective scripts and relate to white Christian understandings of human personhood and grievable life. Methodologically, the analysis of digital artifacts undergirding this paper raises questions about how digital media is implicated in the circulation of religious affect and how religious scholars, and theologians in particular, can engage digital archives in their study of lived religion.
In the late nineteenth century, newspapers around the United States documented the emergence of many “new religious sects.” These movements were so pervasive that newspapers began to compile and joke about them for popular entertainment. Unfortunately, many of these groups have gone unrecorded by scholars due to the lack of archival materials. Using the 1895 “Zalma Angel” as a case study, this paper probes the utility of newspaper databases as a source for studying this trend within popular culture and the limitations built into the creation of these archives. Based in rural Missouri, the fragmentary accounts of the “Zalma Angel” movement varied considerably. From ridicule to limited descriptions, the circulation of details and tone of the reporting outlined normative American religious sensibilities. As a case study, the “Zalma Angel” demonstrates the limits of studying historical popular religion and the role that newspapers played in selectively constructing and obscuring fringe religions.