A Time to Gather: In a Crisis, Understanding Religions
The novel Coronavirus can be fatal or asymptomatic, cause severe respiratory issues or barely register as a cough. And the diversity in religious responses to the pandemic is just as varied.

There is an urgent need to gather preaching data including sermons and statements, as well as other religious responses as the pandemic spreads — not later. A time of crisis elevates the importance of applying an intellectual and empathic approach to understanding other points of view, no matter how different from our own. Enter Preaching Goes Viral: Religious Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic, a student engagement initiative at Miami University that aims to track and analyze the breadth and diversity of religious responses to the pandemic. The initiative focuses on sermons, statements and commentary in English from United States-based institutions and voices.

Deference or Defiance?
So far, religious and political differences have been far from flattened by reaction to the COVID-19 crisis. Churches, synagogues and other religious voices are expressing broad disparity in their sermons and public statements about where they stand between deference and defiance. While some preachers are urging their flocks to stay home, others say that religious duties should not be subject to what they consider secular whims. The response is often more desperate when non-compliance with official guidelines is characterized, rightly or wrongly, as a threat to public health.

In this cultural cacophony, two things are certain:

● Preaching is going viral. Existing theological conflicts and political partisanship over religion are not going away; rather, they are spreading with the crisis and could easily deepen entrenched prejudices.
● Preaching data is disappearing. More religious preaching and expression of messaging is being disseminated online than ever before. But livestreams and other data may not be archived, unless compiled now, and access to original sources is crucial to iron out misunderstandings.

The Initiative:
To capture the comprehensive breadth of religious responses to the spread of COVID- 19, Assistant Professor of Teaching within the Miami University Comparative Religion department, Hillel Gray, and his spring 2020 semester students have launched an innovative research initiative, Preaching Goes Viral.

Preaching Goes Viral is a student engagement initiative in which undergraduates enrolled in Gray’s Spring 2020 Introduction to Religion and Global Jewish Civilization courses are compiling and cataloguing religious responses to the novel coronavirus. Through training in critical distance, research team members are applying qualitative
research and non-judgmental analysis skills to material produced by religious voices and institutions at a time of global public health crisis and social distress.

As an extension of Gray’s ongoing “Empathy and the Religious ‘Enemy’” project, the initiative will build a crowdsourced database that will be made publicly available to journalists, religious groups, scholars, and others seeking to track and understand the religious responses to the pandemic.