GOING LIVE: THE MAKING OF DIGITAL GRIOTS AND CYBER ASSEMBLIES
Abstract
In this essay I make explicit my own positionality as a black woman who preaches and as a practical theologian who studies the connections between digital worship, gender, performativity and preaching. I examine how religious hybridity informs my preaching practice from unconventional pulpits. I assert that ritualized speech—preaching—in sacred digital space—specifically on social media livestreams—intentionally disrupts the popular religious and everyday landscapes, where marginalized bodies are disembodied. Situating myself as a digital griot and those whom frequent my weekly Facebook livestream as a cyber assembly, I offer a thickly described case study of the digital worshipping community Pink Robe Chronicles (PRC). I conclude that alternative mediated pulpits and religiously fluid cyber assemblies are spaces where interlocking cycles of freedom occur. Interlocking cycles of freedom are used, therefore, to remember the sacred worth of black lives and repair the connection between the mundane and the spiritual realm by bearing witness to communities that are strong enough to hold the truth of their members. The impact on current practices is this: through alternative pulpits and consecrated key strokes the practitioner/scholar offers to the community the ability to experience spiritual and cultural freedom in self-determining ways and to the fields of religious practices and practical theology a fresh vantage point from which to observe and be observed.