Christ & Pop Culture

I found a nifty website pertaining to Christianity and media called www.christandpopculture.com. As the website’s subtitle denotes, it is a place “where the Christian faith meets the common knowledge of our age”. This is a great example of how blogs and websites can be so influential in shaping the shared beliefs in a religious tradition. For example, on this website alone there are countless articles about different things in life that the Bible (the Christian’s holy book, what they consider to be the Word of God) does not directly address, and how Christians should handle them, with all kinds of different perspectives on how it can be related to their beliefs. For example: on this page, there is an article under the ‘Technology’ tab titled “What Memes Mean: So Facebook Changed Everything (Again)”. In this article it talks about the recent phenomenon of the “meme”, which is a picture with a caption, usually funny and ironic and pointing out something in society and poking fun of it. In this article, the author points out that memes are just another way humans have found to complain, and ties it in to human nature and how humans need a savior because we are broken and in need of God’s redemption. Very interesting website!

Old Faith, New Media

This blog is dedicated to the study of Christianity, a faith tradition of 2,000 years, and it's relation to new media and digital culture. New media culture is a fairly new phenomenon, with the use of the internet and cell phones and digital media having grown rather quickly over the past few decades. I will examine specific situations pertaining to the Christian Church and it's relation with new media. I want to look at how they use new media to perpetuate and spread their beliefs, through online mediums such as Twitter, Facebook or YouTube.