fundraising

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New podcast: What could go wrong? NYTimes explores Facebook's religious ambitions

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New podcast: What could go wrong? NYTimes explores Facebook's religious ambitions

Truth be told, I am not prone to flashbacks — even though I did come of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Anyway, I had a big flashback recently while reading a very interesting New York Times feature that ran with this headline: “Facebook’s Next Target: The Religious Experience.” In this case, the subhead is also crucial: “The company is intensifying formal partnerships with faith groups across the United States and shaping the future of religious experience.”

Whoa. What does “shaping the future of religious experience” mean? I imagine that to learn details, readers would have to hear from some of the participants in this trailblazing online work. But there’s a problem with that. When asked about some specifics, an official with the Atlanta branch of the trendy Hillsong Church couldn’t answer, because “he had signed a nondisclosure agreement.”

Don’t you hate it when that happens?

Anyway, here’s the passage the stirred up lots of conversation, and my multi-decade flashback, during the recording of this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).

A Facebook spokeswoman said the data it collected from religious communities would be handled the same way as that of other users, and that nondisclosure agreements were standard process for all partners involved in product development.

Many of Facebook’s partnerships involve asking religious organizations to test or brainstorm new products, and those groups seem undeterred by Facebook’s larger controversies. This year Facebook tested a prayer feature, where members of some Facebook groups can post prayer requests and others can respond. The creator of YouVersion, the popular Bible app, worked with the company to test it.

Now, combine that mind-spinning information with this passage, which very gently raises the issue that millions of Americans — on the cultural right and left — are convinced that the Facebook gods have lost control of much of the information that is located on their platform:

The company’s effort to court faith groups comes as it is trying to repair its image among Americans who have lost confidence in the platform, especially on issues of privacy. Facebook has faced scrutiny for its role in the country’s growing disinformation crisis and breakdown of societal trust, especially around politics, and regulators have grown concerned about its outsize power.

This brings me to my flashback to a graduate-school class at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign that changed my life.


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Tick, tick, tick: Days leading up to Jan. 1 (and beyond) will be extra strange for GetReligion

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The Christmas and New Year’s season is always a bit of a strange time here at GetReligion, with people coming and going and getting their work done when they can. We do strive to take a few days off, of course. Sort of.

Frankly, this year is going to be extra strange.

Regular readers may have noticed the recent post in which I explained that, as of Jan. 1, GetReligion will have a new home base. Let me repeat some of that information, in case some people missed it. This will help explain some of the extra strangeness in the next few weeks:

For several years now, I have known that I would retire from full-time work here at GetReligion when the clock struck midnight and we reached Jan. 1, 2020. The question — logically enough — was whether this weblog would shut down or evolve back into something that I could do part-time, which was how things started out long ago.

The good news is that, well, we ain’t dead yet. The bad news is that we will have to do some major downsizing. … Readers will not be surprised to know that — a sign of the times in which we live — the work we will be doing here in the future will require some fundraising. …

But the big news today is that GetReligion will soon have a new home base, one linked directly to First Amendment studies, which means work tied to freedom of the press and freedom of religion.

As of Jan. 1, we will be based at the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics, which is next door to the School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi. The chairman of the center is Charles L. Overby, for 22 years the CEO of the Freedom Forum, a non-partisan foundation focusing on the press, religious freedom and the First Amendment.

Or, as I summed things up at the end, we are talking “journalism, the First Amendment, good friends and barbecue.”

However, a big question remains — because of the role that fundraising now plays in our future. That question: What will GetReligion look like after Jan. 1?


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Oh, those religious fund-raisers

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Oh, those religious fund-raisers

(Paraphrasing) She attended a fund-raising event for an unnamed organization where a slide show began by saying that “on the eighth day God created” this group and then presented its purposes. She found that “arrogant and self-serving” and it “bothered me beyond belief. Am I being overly sensitive?” Still, religious offenses are in the eye of the beholder and fund-raising is well worth some examination. The late Henri Nouwen observed in A Spirituality of Fundraising (Upper Room Books) that work for financial support should be seen as a “ministry” of the kingdom, not “a necessary but unpleasant activity.”

Since this question is posed to “Religion Q and A” we can assume the organization is religious. Though The Guy wasn’t present, sounds like the leaders of this group were simply saying God created the cosmos in six days and rested on the seventh, while from day eight forward to the present divinely aligned activities depend upon our human efforts.

Understood correctly, that’s no heresy, and seems to The Guy he’s heard a sermon or three saying precisely that. This agency presumably believes it is working to carry forward God’s purposes in the world, which almost any church or religious charity might think or say about itself.


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