Thursday 22 April 2010

Digital Evangelism


jesus_with_cat5
Originally uploaded by pixelwhip
On Monday I'm going to be looking at digital evangelism with my MA class. Here are some of the questions we will discuss:
  • In what ways does the medium of the internet affect the way we witness?
  • In what ways does the medium of the internet affect the content of our witness?
  • In what sense are people on the internet real people to whom we need to witness?
  • In what sense is the internet a new place where Christians should bear witness?
  • Are there some understandings of evangelism that are particularly appropriate to the internet and if so are there other understandings that are particularly inappropriate?
  • To what extent is a witness on the internet disembodied witness and can disembodied witness be faithful witness?
Anyone out there want to join in? Have you got any questions of your own? What about answers?

Tuesday 20 April 2010

Religion in Britain

A cracking new online resource for research into religion in Britain has just been launched by the British Religion in Numbers project.  All kinds of quality data, maps and charts to be had.  Here's how they introduce themselves:
Numbers aren't just for statisticians. People want to visualise and understand data for work, for study, for general interest, or to settle a debate. Many debates over religion rest on questions of how large? how many? how typical?

Religious data sources tend to be difficult to find, or need a good deal of interpretation. For example, is Britain 72% Christian, as the 2001 Census reported, or 50% Christian, as found by the 2008 British Social Attitudes survey?

We want to draw religious data sources together, explain how data can be used, and present some examples intuitively to a wide audience.

BRIN is based at the University of Manchester and supported by the Religion and Societyhttp://www.manchester.ac.uk/ research programme.
HT Ruth Gledhill.