TY - CONF T1 - Clothed With Strength And Dignity: How Evangelical Women are Re-Claiming and Re-Constructing the Evangelical Church in the Blogosphere Y1 - 2013 A1 - Vanessa Reimer KW - Blogosphere KW - Christianity KW - Digital Religion KW - Evangelical Church KW - female KW - GENDER KW - Women AB - Much has been written on the significance of the religious web log or “blog” in the past decade, especially as its growing popularity among authors and readers alike has coincided with the continued decline in institutional church attendance in the West (see Cheong et al, Corrigon et al, Campbell, and West). However, much less has been written on the significance of religious blogs authored by women, and particularly those that are written from a standpoint of cultivated ambivalencei toward the doctrines and practices of their religious traditions; a phenomenon that is especially poignant for feminist scholars to consider given the historical tendency for patriarchal religious institutions to marginalize and delegitimize women's voices (Bammert 155; Gallagher 215; Steiner-Aeschliman and Mauss 248). To that end, it is further pertinent to consider the growing popularity of religious blogs authored by women in North America who identify as evangelical Protestant—a Christian tradition that remains largely (albeit not exclusively) committed to the value of patriarchal authority within and outside the institutional church, even (and especially) while some mainline Protestant denominations have been adopting the value of gender equality both at the institutional and doctrinal levels (Steiner-Aeschliman and Mauss 248; Keller and Ruether xxxviii-xxxix). This exploratory study accordingly employs feminist Critical Discourse Analysis to investigate a purposive selection of religious blogs that are authored by evangelical women and written from a standpoint of cultivated ambivalence. PB - The World Social Science Forum CY - Montreal, Canada UR - http://www.wssf2013.org/sites/wssf2013.org/files/full_papers/extended_abstract_pdf.pdf ER -