"In at least some cases, visual images can challenge normative and normalized ways of grasping the world and prompt their viewers to see differently-and even bring people together. Seeing and Believing marshals religious resources to recast the significance of digital images in the struggle for social justice. Ellen T. Armour examines what distinguishes digital photography from its analogue predecessor and places the circulation of digital images in the broader context of virtual visual cultures. She explores the challenges and opportunities that visually saturated social media landscapes present for users and organizers. Despite the power of digital platforms and algorithms, possibilities for disruption and resistance emerge from how people engage with these systems. Armour offers ways of seeing drawn from Christianity and found in other religious traditions to help us break with entrenched habits and rethink how we engage with the images that grab our attention. Developing theological perspectives on the power and peril of photography and technology, Seeing and Believing provides suggestions for navigating the new media landscape that can spark what Armour calls "photographic insurrection." (Publisher description)

"Though my turn to religion as a resource occurs in the final chapter, religion’s pertinence to the topic at hand emerges much earlier— and not only (or even primarily) from direct engagement with work by religious studies scholars. It turns out that a certain metaphorical theo- logic widely associated with Christianity appears in scholarship on social media and its visual culture that has no explicit connection to the study of religion at all. That may be surprising to some readers but not to me. As I argued in the introduction to Signs and Wonders, thanks to its imbrication in colonialism and its successor, globalization, Christian theologics are in the (cultural) air we breathe and the (cultural) water we drink. As I document in subsequent chapters, scholars of social media see our new media ecosystem as godlike in the scope and power of its reach. Thus, they turn to traditional theological tropes like omniscience (God knows all) and omnipotence (God controls all) as metaphors to convey these insights— and quite effectively. This theo-logic persuasively illuminates this ecosystem’s effect on us and on our world. However, I’ll argue that it also risks overestimating its all-too-human limitations." (Preface, pages xvi-xvii)