Media, Public Scholarship and Religious Controversy: Notes from Trump’s America

The persistence of religion in the twenty-first century has renewed the importance of scholarships devoted to it. At the same time, the digital age has re-positioned and recentered the affordances of mediated circulations around "the religious." This increasing presence and significance of media and religion suggests that substantive scholarships of religion must necessarily articulate media as well. Religious controversies therefore present a special challenge and a special opportunity to scholarships of media and religion. New ways of doing scholarship, and doing so publicly, present themselves. All scholarships of mediated religion must necessarily be public, so scholarship is articulated into these circulations, and at the same time can build on and benefit from knowledge-building that occurs outside the formal boundaries of the academy. This paper explores emerging theories of digital mediation and proposes a circulation-focused understanding of the role, place, and potentials of scholarships today.