Elizabeth Drescher

Lecturer, Religious Studies Department

Elizabeth Drescher holds a PhD in Christian Spirituality from the Graduate Theological Union (2008) and an MA in Roman Catholic Systematic Theology from Duquesne University (2000).

Dr. Drescher is the author of Choosing Our Religion: The Spiritual Lives of American Nones (Oxford University Press), Tweet If You [Heart] Jesus: Practicing Church in the Digital Reformation (Morehouse, 2011) and co-author, with Keith Anderson, of Click 2 Save: The Digital Ministry Bible (Morehouse, 2012). In addition to academic essays and book chapters on lived religion in America, she has published popular articles on American religious and spiritual life, new media and religion, and the challenges of religious leadership have appeared in America, The Atlantic Wire, AlterNet, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Jose Mercury News, Religion Dispatches, Christianity Today, Sojourners, FaithStreet, and other national publications. She is a consulting scholar at The BTS Center, where she edits the Bearings magazine. From 2012-2014, she was a journalism fellow on the Social Science Research Council's "New Directions in the Study of Prayer" initiative.

Courses

RSOC 51 Religion in America
RSOC 119 (New) Media & Religion
TESP 79 Women & the Christian Tradition
TESP 4 The Christian Tradition

Publications

Choosing Our Religion: The Spiritual Lives of America’s Nones (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Click 2 Save: The Digital Ministry Bible, with Keith Anderson (Morehouse, 2012).

Tweet If You ♥ Jesus: Practicing Church in the Digital Reformation (Morehouse: May 2011).

“Nones in the News: Mass Media Explorations of the Religiously Unaffiliated,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the American News Media, edited by Diane Winston (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

"Nones by Many Other Names: The Religiously Unaffiliated in the News, 18th to 20th Century," in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the American News Media, edited by D. Winston (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

"News Media Creation and Recreation of the Spiritual-But-Not-Religious," in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the American News Media, edited by D. Winston (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

“Spiritual But Not Religious in the News Media,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the American News Media, edited by Diane Winston (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

“Pixels Perpetual Shine: Mediating Illness, Dying, and Death in the Digital Age,” CrossCurrents (July, 2012).

Review of Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010) and Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), Journal of Technology, Theology & Religion (October 2010).

“Re-Engineering the Teaching Machine: Big Questions from the Inside Out and the Outside In,” Special issue of Religion and Education, vol. 36: 2 (September 2009).

“Spirituality in Higher Education: Toward a Holistic Approach to the Development of Future Faculty in Theology & Religion,” Special issue of Religion and Education, vol. 36: 2 (September 2009).

"The Gospel According to the Nones: Reading Scripture without Religion," America (July 8-15, 2015)