New Media Project blog refocuses

By Verity A. Jones

Beginning in February 2013, the New Media Project blog will publish on a new schedule with a new thematic framework. It’s time to refocus the impressive collection of blog content we’ve created over the last two years and expand the conversation. And we’d like your help to do so.

During the week of Ash Wednesday, we will launch four to six week series of mid-week blog posts on one topic. Building on the strength of the New Media Project, we’ll explore one topic from the different theological, practical, and historical lens of our research fellows and guest writers. For example, for a series on “prayer and social media,” writers would address how their own traditions and theological bents think about prayer in a world increasingly shaped by digital communication, responding to the other writers’ different perspectives.

One goal is to demonstrate theological dialogue about digital communication, i.e., thinking theologically about new media, in the medium itself. A second goal is to produce sets of material that could easily become curricula for religious leaders and communities of faith seeking to think theologically about new media. Toward the latter goal, each series will be accompanied by recommended resources and how-to information, including links to prior New Media Project blog posts on the topics.

We would like your help to select topics for these series. Over the next month while we analyze past content, we invite you to tell us what you’d like to read on this blog. What topics would you like us to cover in a series? Prayer, privacy online, distraction and attentiveness, community-building, what else? To respond, write a comment, email us at NewMediaProject@cts.edu, or best of all, share it on our Facebook page.

Verity A. Jones is the executive director of the Center for Pastoral Excellence at Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis, and project director of the New Media Project which is now part of this new Center.

The New Media Project is a research project helping religious leaders become theologically savvy about technology. To request permission to repost this content, please contact newmediaproject@cts.edu.