Reflections on Christian Historians and Social Media

Jonathan Den Hartog

From September 24th to 27th, 300 historians met on the idyllic campus of Pepperdine University for the biennial meeting of the Conference on Faith and History. This year's program, organized by Jay Green, Eric Miller, and John Fea, sought to raise the issue of "Christian Historians and Their Publics."

Pepperdine: Hard to capture its beauty, on-line.
In response to the conference theme, I assembled a panel to address the theme of "Christian Historians and Social Media." The panel consisted of John Fea, Modern European historian Chris Gehrz, and RiAH's very own Paul Putz. The presenters were spectacular, as was the conversation that followed. We wanted to continue the conversation--and demonstrate how our talking about social media might make a larger contribution in the social media world. To do that, we decided to share our comments online last week and then wrap up the session here, with this post.

We hoped our panel would contribute to a larger discussion that has been going on on-line, as well as at panels at places like the meeting of the Organization of American Historians and which will continue at the American Historical Association meeting and the American Society of Church History meeting (including a panel with Chris Cantwell) this coming January.


I opened the session with some questions that I hoped might generate discussion. They can be found here.

John Fea's comments followed.

Then came Chris Gehrz.

Finally we heard from Paul Putz.

In the session, we were fortunate to have some live-tweeting going on. Some of it even came from our panelists! Chris Gehrz collected the relevant tweets here. For even more, you can follow the twitter hashtag #CFH2014. (This may generate some reflection on how a live-tweeted session may be communicated differently to the twitterverse than as experienced by participants.)

We have also had some web feed-back, with reflections from Warren Throckmorton and John Wilsey.

We wanted to use the Comments section of this post as a final place for interaction. If this conversation is of interest anywhere, it should be to the readers of and contributors to this blog.

So, with all of that background material, the digital floor is now open for comments and questions.

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