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Digital Jesus documents how like-minded individuals created a large web of religious communication on the Internet, in essence developing a new type of new religious movement--one without a central leader or institution. By tracing the group's origins back to the email lists and "Usenet" groups of the 1980s up to the online forums of today, Digital Jesus also serves as a succinct history of the development of online group communications.--From publisher description

This article shows that digital technologies can play an outsized role in populist discourse because the imagined "voice of the people" gains its authority through the appearance of continuities and consistencies across many iterative communication events. Those iterations create an observable aggregate volition which is the basis of vernacular authority. Digital technologies give institutions the ability to generate those iterative communications quickly. Through example analyses, I show three different ways that institutional actors deployed digital technologies to promote their populist political agendas by manufacturing "the will of the people." Each of these examples suggests that digital technologies hybridize communication in ways that suggest the elite are always already part of "the people."

Based on the interactive features of websites, researchers have distinguished between 'religion online' and 'online religion'.Approaching online religious expression as 'vernacular religion' can transcend the distinction by focussing on the lived experience of believers. In this study, qualitative interviews and close textual analysis are deployed to locate four traits that define the 'vernacular ideology of Christian fundamentalism'. Tracing these traits in public discourse, they are seen to emerge as a set in the early 20th century. Collecting a sample of 40 sites, the traits are located in association with biblical prophecy. Based on qualitative interviews conducted with four individuals in the sample, linked websites connect individuals in a virtual 'ekklesia' based on their shared interest. Locating religion in lived experience instead of media artifacts, this research suggests that a limiting tendency found in this form of fundamentalism is the result of individual choices facilitated by network media.

As rhetorical scholars adopt field methods to complement traditional text-based criticism, it is necessary to reflect on the ethical standards that guide our practice of rhetorical criticism and analysis. In this essay, we highlight five points of ethical tension provoked when doing research that moves between texts and fields: responsibility, truth, power, relationships, and representation. Each section illustrates an ethical dilemma from the authors' individual research projects that illustrates one of these tensions, and is followed by a response that explicates the questions of power and ethics. While the ethics of any research practice are often tied to a specific project, many of the issues we discuss apply widely to the practice of fieldwork and rhetorical criticism in general, and many of the questions we raise also resonate with one another. As such, the dialogic quality of the essay is meant to serve as its content as well as its form. We suggest that rhetorical discussions of power help all qualitative researchers better understand what is at stake when we move between text and field in our research practice.

This book explores the ways that scholars, journalists, politicians, and citizens conceive of "the public" or "public life," and how those entities are defined and invented. For decades, scholars have used the metaphors of spheres, systems, webs, or networks to talk about, describe, and map various practices. This volume proposes a new metaphor-modalities-to suggest that publics are forever in flux, and much more fluid and dynamic than the static models of systems or spheres would indicate-especially in the digital age, where various publics rapidly evolve and dissipate. Contributors to th