Religion Beyond Memes: Enhancing Public Discourse About Faith and Practice

This conference report is based on the third of a series of conferences dedicated to “Changing the Conversation about Religion,” organized by the Contending Modernities research initiative within the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, part of the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs. The “Religion Beyond Memes: Enhancing Public Discourse About Faith and Practice' conference, which was held in Washington DC in October 2019, sought to explore the complexities of religion at a time when a cascade of social media platforms shapes how people practice their faiths. Conference participants analyzed how religion has been represented in and beyond the news media, pondered what to make of distorted representations of religion, and discussed how to counteract unbalanced representations of religious groups, movements, and individuals. This report summarizes those discussions and analysis.