Twitter – Michael Graziano

There’s a lot to say about the coverage of Reza Aslan’s interview with Fox News.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YY92TV4_Wc0

Andrew Kaczynski over at Buzzfeed covered the interview under the title “Is This The Most Embarrassing Interview Fox News Has Ever Done?” (I bet you can’t guess how he answers that particular question.) Amusement and outrage was evident on Twitter as well, where the #foxnewslitcrit hashtag has become popular in religious studies circles.

The most interesting part of this, to me, is Fox News host Lauren Green’s opening question: “You’re a Muslim, so why did you write a book about the founder of Christianity?” The logic of Green’s question seems to be that being a Muslim precludes one from studying Christianity. At the very least, it seeks to color with suspicion those Muslims who choose to study it. There’s much to be said about this, of course, and one of my colleagues Thomas Whitley already summed up much of what I’d like to say. So, too, did Imran Ali Malik:

Joined by several of my graduate colleagues from FSU, I spent this past weekend in Indianapolis at the Third Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture. Hosted by the Center of the same name, the conference brought together a variety of scholars broadly interested in Religious Studies in an American context.

One of the most interesting panels was the Saturday session on “Religion and Social Media,” featuring Verity Jones, Kathryn Reklis, Scott Thuma and Jonathan Van Antwerpen. The panelists began by discussing how religious groups have made use of various forms of social media, but the conversation quickly shifted to how scholarly approaches to digital media are informed by our own theoretical frameworks. Reklis challenged attendees to conceive of the digital world as “cyberspace” rather than “virtual,” arguing that “virtual” suggests a degree of un-realness reflective of an old way of thinking about the Internet. Everything on the Internet, Reklis suggested, is very much real. Van Antwerpen employed the vocabulary of Pierre Bourdieu to suggest that social media may best be understood as improvised fields of discursive struggle. The attendees seemed to be split about the utility of social media for scholars of religion. Not surprisingly, that split seemed to be largely (but not entirely) generational. Continue reading

Tag: Twitter

Paging Edward Said

Religious Studies and Social Media