Adam DJ Brett

Adam DJ Brett

@adjb.co

🌲 International Research Associate @aila.social 📓 Associate editor @jcrt.org 🎓 Visiting Professor for Digital Humanities & Indigenous Studies 🍊 @syracuseu.bsky.social (PhD) alum 🕸️ www.adamdjbrett.com. #acrel --- provena18b3d views are my own

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Adam DJ Brett
@adjb.co

Friends, do you have any recommendations for an indie replacement for the now-sunsetted Vimeo OTT for selling on-demand video streaming? #webdev

Adam DJ Brett reposted

Public Theology
@publictheology.com

Change happens to people without their partnership. Transition is something people build together. Most churches right now are living through change.

publictheology.comBetween the parade and the templeThe moments standing in the middle of Palm Sunday’s parade and the overturned tables in the temple are moments our church calendar never names. The crowd has shouted hosanna; the reckoning has not yet come. I’ve spent my ministry standing in that moment: at bedsides as a death doula, on a crisis line with the Trevor project, in coaching conversations about vocation, and through 21 years in the Navy. I have returned to United Lutheran Seminary to give it a name. My conviction is simple. Change happens to people without their partnership. Transition is something people build together. Most churches right now are living through change. Geographer Michael Broadway notes that weekly worship attendance nationally has fallen from 42 to 30% in two decades, and that median attendance in ELCA congregations dropped from 100 to 60 between 2000 and 2019. Tracing mergers and closers across Michigan’s Upper Peninsula back to 1966, he treats them as inevitable. I want to argue otherwise, and not about the numbers. Many churches have become rural in a deeper sense: they have pulled inward beneath what sociologist Peter Berger calls a sacred canopy, whether they sit on a country road or downtown. Geography is not what decides their future. Posture is: scarcity or abundance. And much of the help on offer, one fix for every church or fear sold as a product, takes away the very agency a congregation needs to discern what it wants to become. So this blog will look at churches as networks of trust. In digital humanities, a network is people or things (nodes) joined by relationships (edges). The sketch above draws 1 congregation twice. On the left, scarcity: a tight cluster that talks mostly to itself beneath the barrier while a ready made fix presses in. On the right, the same people keep every tie they had and begin building new ones with neighbors as trust allows. Some are formed; Some are still forming; Some neighbors have not yet Ben met and the invitation remains available. Diagrams and maps like this can mislead. Stanford’s Mapping the Republic of Letters project charts thousands of enlightenment letters, but it cannot say what any tie meant, or who owed what to whom, the relational knowledge Brown, Whaanga, and Lewis insist on. A churches claim of “everyone is welcome” counts nodes. The Mama Bears, a community of mothers of LGBTQIA2S+ children, asks about edges instead: who may lead, whose weddings happen, whose names are used. ReconcilingWork’s Reconciling in Christ journey asks the same questions, and calls itself a journey begun from its “own unique context”, not a checklist. Expect posts on transition and trust; On queer inclusion, disability justice, and cultural justice; on what church records keep and miss; And on neighbors who, like Cornelius for Peter, turn out to be where God already was. This blog lives in two places on purpose, Humanities Commons and PublicTheology.com. Sarah bond warns that academia.edu, a for profit with an Edu name, profits from scholars who fill it. A nonprofit Commons answers to the people who use it, and I want this work to live where people are not the product. You do not need to tell me who you are to be part of this. Read quietly, or answer one of these in the comments: Where has your church been a protest march, and where a temple? Who has shown you God’s image where you did not expect it? I will listen before I build. We do not have to have arrived to be on the way together.

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David M. Perry
@lollardfish.bsky.social

Listen: if you care about History, especially history written for broad audiences, we need review sites. It’s basically impossible for me to sell book reviews the mainstream media applications now. So I’m asking you to subscribe to this one.

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Ian Coldwater 🧊🚫
@lookitup.baby

Hi, I’m a sighted alt text user! Here are some reasons I use it: - Slow Internet on an airplane - I’m over 40, I have no idea who that celebrity is - Bluesky broke images again - My vision sucks and that text is too small to read otherwise - Conveys further context and authorial intent

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Adam DJ Brett reposted

Public Theology
@publictheology.com
publictheology.comNetworking Across the Brokenness**What might a quick sketch of my personal network of relationships and connections in the broken global Body of Christ look like?** While my extended family represents many denominations, I pastor in a local United Methodist Church in the USA while serving with neighbors in our town’s ecumenical council of churches. I also presently study in a Lutheran Seminary. When I start sketching the relationships and nodes, I quickly see the mounting complexities and crisscrossing of our historical and theological connections. It’s always encouraged me that **my tradition started as a network of people from multiple denominations.** In the 1720s a couple of Anglican brothers at Oxford were cultivating a small ecumenical gathering to grow in grace and for “watching over one another in love.”[1] Calvinists, Moravians, and more joined those Anglicans tenaciously holding one another accountable regarding their discipleship and active involvement in Christ’s Body and work in the world. So tenacious, in fact, they were soon mocked for their “methods” and their “Holy Club.”[2] Across the Atlantic from that first ecumenical network of “methodists,” **Methodism was institutionalized as a denomination** in 1784. But like so many in the ongoing saga of the Body of Christ across history, America’s “Methodist Episcopal Church” developed it’s own history of fractures too. New to the world of digital network diagramming, **I come curious to explore ways the broken global Body of Christ could look representing us digitally across our history and divisions.** There are a variety of graphic digital projects online that venture into this diagramming. I see straightforward charts like the “Christian Denominations Tree” from Scrollchart to narrated and interpretive mapping such as Christian Johnson’s Prezi “Mapping Denominational Splits in Christianity.” While exposing our broken Body, these examples demonstrate how easily we can flatten the nuances of the conflicts that have lead to the exponential divisions. In fact, neither makes the radical splintering graphically explicit. However, the Scrollchart piece has a subtle but significant note near the bottom: “~45,000 denominations exist today.”[3] **Mapping that messiness could help us begin wrestling with what this brokenness must look like to heaven’s eyes.** CS Lewis said, > _“If you could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would look like one single growing thing–rather like a very complicated tree. Every individual would appear connected with every other.”_[4] The rapidly increasing division and separations within the Body of Christ would likely map as a terrible converse, perhaps an _upside down_ tree. But capturing the roiling historical conflicts and politicization, network diagramming has a potential for actualizing a sense of the dynamic motion of fragmentation while at the same time maintaining the reality of our connection to Christ. More digital network analysis may lend language and concepts that can prompt us to take on better work between the nodes, on the edges, even substantial relationship work where we are. **Technology and AI cannot replace the relational work we must learn to attend across this broken Body.** But even these tools are birthing conversations that can help us with better incarnational work on the ground across our differences. For example, notice some of the magnanimous language and practices born from recent “Indigenous Protocol and AI (IP-AI) Workshops. Guidelines include * Systems of engagement are designed in partnership with specific communities * There is a circle of relationality and reciprocity when communities are engaged * A primary concern for responsibility to one’s community is honored * There is an ongoing respect and support for traditional understandings of trust and care[5] While these guidelines are meant to shape AI systems’ engaging with indigenous communities, they articulate powerful ethical approaches to which we can aspire to embody as we network across the edges and between the nodes of our fractured Body of Christ. ## Endnotes * * * 1. Ashley Boggan and Christ Heckert, _Calling on Fire : Reclaiming the Method of Methodism_ (Abingdon, 2025). 38. ↩︎ 2. Ibid., xvii. ↩︎ 3. “(Pew / Center for Study of Global Christianity estimate). Eastern Orthodox: ~260M. Catholic: ~1.3B. Protestant: ~900M.” https://scrollchart.com/diagram/christian-denominations ↩︎ 4. C.S. Lewis, _Mere Christianity_ (Macmillan, 1967). 156. ↩︎ 5. Michelle Lee Brown, Hemi Whaanga, and Jason Edward Lewis, “Relation Oriented AI: Why Indigenous Protocols Matter for the Digital Humanities” in Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, ed., _Debates in the Digital Humanities_ (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2023).78-80. ↩︎

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Public Theology
@publictheology.com
publictheology.comHumanities Coding in the Information AgeCoding has been consistently present in my life, particularly early on. In elementary school, my classmates and I programmed LOGOS turtles to move around a screen. I have written the traditional “Hello World!” introduction code in multiple computer languages. I copied video game code out of magazines to build fighting games or create programs to play music that I keyed in. In my junior year of college, I wrote a program to simulate the chaotic system of the driven, damped, pendulum, cranking through numerical solutions of differential equations. In graduate school, I routinely used Matlab code to analyze audio signals. As my kids grew up, I introduced them to platforms like Scratch where they could begin their own projects. One of those kids is now a software engineer. For me, coding has always been connected to the scientific endeavor, running calculations, digital signal processes, or other such work. Whether it is hubris or subject blindness, I will confess that website development hardly counted as coding in my eyes. It always felt perhaps more like a craft project people used to show off the sweaters they made for their cats. This misguided notion of mine was formed in the age of people pimping out their Myspace and geocities pages. In the development of an inherently online existence, coding is far more important in web design for engagement to be sure, but ever more the real power lay in one’s ability to access information. The access to information is one of the most powerful currencies in this information age. While companies and corporations want people to be able to access information in order to maximize their profit, projects that seek to inform and edify others for their own sake, are vital partners in the work toward such goals as the common good, solidarity and justice. These projects need solid coding to offer information as well as be able to create space for people to share what they know. This understanding is especially important in the humanities, as evidenced by the _Painting On Walls_ project. Erin Benay describes the project in her case study “Art History and Action In The Rust Belt.”[[1]](#_edn1) Benay worked in the Cleveland area, as what she called an “engaged art historian.”[^2] Cleveland, like many other Rust Belt cities that suffered decline with the crumbling of the steel industry, had a robust mural tradition. Abandoned buildings make excellent canvasses for murals, after all. Benay started a service learning course at Case Western Reserve University, in collaboration with LAND Studio’s Inter|Urban project, where students learned the history of murals and do something with that knowledge that went beyond traditional class work. Benay wrote, “I wondered how we might connect the longer history of mural painting with the more recent trajectories of urban development and public art-making that regularly appeared in Cleveland news. Even more significantly, I was curious to see if it was possible for students of art history to _do_ something with this knowledge, rather than to simply regurgitate it in neatly conceived seminar papers.”[^3] As the course progressed and students documented and learned about the murals, it became evident that passersby engaged the public art visually. That each of the murals was based on Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards went largely unknown. Students in the course wanted to provide access to background material and context for the murals. The murals could move beyond an object of visual engagement and offer something more. To accomplish this end, the students created informational text about murals and placed them in train and bus platforms. Additionally, they created QR codes that offered greater information about the art. Benay wrote, “Developing a better mobile app and more sophisticated digital mapping interface for Inter|Urban would, students believed, allow this content to be more accessible to the very underrepresented populations that the texts seek to address.” [^4] Among all of the art history, coding underlined the work that took the information to the people of Cleveland giving a broader view of the people who lived in the city. This work of coding moved this project beyond a class assignment and connected folks outside of academia. * * * [^2]: Benay, p. 96 [^3]: Benay, p.99 [^4]:Benay, p. 105 * * * 1. Benay, Erin, “Art History and Action in the Rust Belt” _The Routledge Companion to Public Humanities Scholarship_. Routledge. 2024 ↩︎

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Public Theology
@publictheology.com
publictheology.comTitle: Digital Humanities as Public Ministry: Reimagining Formation Beyond Christian HegemonyDigital Humanities (DH) is often framed as a technical field — data, metadata, platforms, tools. But for those of us doing public ministry, DH is not simply a method. It is a **site of theological struggle** , a place where power, narrative, and community collide. When we bring DH into the DMin classroom, we are not teaching pastors how to “use technology.” We are teaching them how to **see the digital as a contested theological landscape**. Christian hegemony has shaped the digital world just as deeply as it has shaped our pulpits, seminaries, and denominational structures. The platforms we rely on — from search engines to social media to academic repositories — encode assumptions about authority, neutrality, and “the center.” DH gives us tools to expose those assumptions, to map them, and to imagine alternatives. In my own work, I turn to DH not as a novelty but as a **decolonial practice**. Network graphs become ways of visualizing whose voices dominate theological discourse — and whose voices are systematically excluded. Metadata becomes a theological question: _Who gets named? Who gets tagged? Who gets archived?_ Public-facing DH projects become pastoral interventions, creating space for communities to narrate themselves rather than be narrated by dominant traditions. For DMin students, this work is transformative. They begin to see that public ministry is not only preaching and teaching — it is **curating, interpreting, and challenging the digital ecosystems that shape their congregations’ imaginations**. DH becomes a way to practice liberation theology in real time: naming power, disrupting hierarchy, and building alternative networks of meaning. A DH-informed public theology refuses to accept the digital world as neutral. It insists that formation happens everywhere — in the feed, in the archive, in the algorithm. And it equips leaders to intervene with courage, creativity, and theological depth. This is the work of resisting Christian hegemony. This is the work of public ministry. This is the work DH makes possible.
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Adam DJ Brett
@adjb.co

A Comment On NARF’s Amicus Curiae Brief Filed on Behalf of the National Congress of American Indians and the Inter Tribal Association of Arizona, LLC, in Support of the Tohono O’odham Nation stevennewcomb.substack.com/p/a-comment-...

stevennewcomb.substack.comA Comment On NARF’s Amicus Curiae Brief Filed on Behalf of the National Congress of American Indians and the Inter Tribal Association of Arizona, LLC, in Support of the Tohono O’odham NationIn Honor of Tecumseh Who Fell in Battle 213 Years Ago Today

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Bookshop.org
@bookshop.org

Anti-Prime Day starts…NOW! 🥳 Today through midnight on 10/7, enjoy free shipping site-wide, all while supporting local, independent bookstores.