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Immersive Christianity: On Religion, Entertainment, and Globalization
Date: April 13, 2015
Time: 4:30 PM - 6:30 PM
Event Description
Dr. James Bielo will deliver a lecture on his ethnographic study of the Ark Encounter, a proposed $150 million theme park to be built on 800 acres in Kentucky. This lecture is titled "Immersive Christianity: On Religion, Entertainment, and Globalization." Bielo is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Miami University of Ohio and the author of "Words upon the Word: An Ethnography of Evangelical Bible Study" (NYU Press, 2009) and "Emerging Evangelicals: Faith, Modernity, and the Desire for Authenticity" (NYU Press, 2011). He is currently working on his third ethnography tentatively titled, "Creative Creationists: The Making of a Biblical Theme Park." In Monday's lecture, he will share his research exploring the creation, negotiation, and consumption of evangelical Christianity through the Ark Encounter. Having had unprecedented access to the creative team - primarily a group of former Disney employees highly skilled in entertainment media - he asks how the decisions about how to portray the story of Noah speaks to questions of evangelical Christian experience in the United States and how people experience their faith in a world marked by immersion in heavily mediated encounters. Dr. Bielo's lecture is presented by the Departments of Sociology & Anthropology and Communication at Wheaton College.
