MERGE digital religion & gender

@MSCActions project exploring Catholic social movements, gender, digital media. Researcher: @giuliaevolvi, at @Unibo & @CUBoulder_CMRC

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MERGE project: the what, why, who, where, when, and how of a project studying Catholic social movements and gender discourses on social media #Catholicism #MarieCurie #MSCActions #MSCA #gender #SocialMedia

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However, the last to Pope made some progresses in saying that LGBTQ+ people need to be included, and there are several groups of LGBTQ+ Catholics that advocate for a change in the church.

And with this, happy pride month!

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Can you be LGBTQ+ & Catholic?

While several European countries are making progresses towards the inclusion of LGBTQ+ people, the Catholic Church continues to consider marriage as between a man and a woman.

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I promise I'll stop talking about the Encyclical, but Pope Leo XIV mentioned some very interesting women!

Do you know all of them?

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MERGE quote:
“In different contexts, many courageous and generous women have also stood out, including Saint Laura Montoya, Saint Teresa of Calcutta, Dorothy Day, Marie Skłodowska-Curie, Maria Montessori, Elisabeth Elliot, Wangari Maathai, Benazir Bhutto and countless others”

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If you think about it, it's exactly what's happening now with AI. So, technology is not necessarily bad, but needs to be used in a way that centers the human being. Here's the link of the Encyclical: https://t.co/fbi2IpMoTD

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Do we need a new Social Doctrine of the Church?

The Pope's Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas is interesting, and not only because it cites Tolkien.

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He goes back to Pope's Leo XIII's (his namesake) Encyclical Rerum Novarum, written at the time of the Industrial Revolution, where the Social Doctrine of the Church was written to address the care of the marginalized when new technologies were coming into being.

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This reading suggestion might be somewhat expected, but people studying technology, media and religion need to read this text this week!

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In his first Encyclical, Pope Leo XIV writes:

"The power and prevalence of emerging technologies are interwoven into the fabric of daily life, shaping decision-making processes and deeply affecting the collective imagination"

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However, 50 years after the first Women's Ordination Conference in Detroit, the Catholic Church still hasn't implemented women's ordination.

A suggested reading: Chaves, M. (1999). Ordaining Women: Culture and Conflict in Religious Organizations Harvard University Press.

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In 1975, Catholic women started to ask to be ordained as priests.

The context made them hopeful: second-wave feminist women were demanding more rights, and several other congregations (like the Episcopal Church) started ordaining women.

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“I loved being a priest. And also being a wife and mother and grandmother. It prepared me for ministry in a way thata single person, celibate person, might not be prepared.”

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What makes you proud?

I've asked this question to several women who had incredible lives with amazing achievements.

Swipe to read some of the things that make them proud.

This is the second part, look at oldest posts for the first one.

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“ I'm proud in a very humble way of the women that I've ordained.”

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For people in Rome & people attending the EUARE conference, please come to Dr. Trattner's lecture for the Digital Religion Research Award

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About last week’s seminar at @Blanquerna with @miriamdiez https://t.co/cuCtL6iDWj

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The Pope is also forming a commission for AI, so the matter of artificial feelings is getting more and more pressing also for religious leaders.

To check Noreen Herzfeld's work https://t.co/0kfUCjGkY3

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Would you date a chatbot?

It seems like some people report falling in love with AI assistants, like in the movie "Her".

But as Sherry Turkle says, the performance of empathy is not empathy. Chatbots don't have human experiences, so they can't have feelings.

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These reflections are inspired by a workshop I attended with the scholars of the Science and Research Center in Koper, and Noreen Herzfeld, at @ObsBlanquerna