| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Friday, March 29, 2019 | 4:00PM - 6:00PM | External Event, AP367, Anthropology Building, 19 Russell St. |
A multisite church is a single church that meets at multiple locations, often through the use of audio, projection, and even hologram technologies. Nearly all megachurches in the world have adopted this franchise-like form in the last decade, but this fairly new organizational practice originated in South Korea in the 1970s. This talk draws upon transnational ethnographic research at two of the first multisite churches in the world: Yoido Full Gospel Church and Onnuri Church. Following the speaker’s participant-observation on production technology teams at these churches, this talk illustrates Christian efforts to create and maintain “holy infrastructures” [kŏrukhan inp’ŭra] through one’s body, actions, and the objects of one’s practice. Ultimately, this talk asks how one might imagine ethics and pursue the good life in a world permeated by often unseen networks of contact and communion, conscription and contagion.
Heather Mellquist Lehto is a cultural anthropologist who studies religion, technology, and social relations. She is currently a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Toronto, and she holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and a master’s degree in religious studies from Harvard Divinity School. Her first book manuscript, Holy Infrastructure: The Multisite Church Revolution in South Korea and the United States draws on two years of multisited ethnographic research in Seoul and Los Angeles to explore the coordination of technological and religious innovation in some of the world’s first and largest multisite churches.
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