scholarly journals Mapping Digital Religion: Exploring the Need for New Typologies

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 373
Author(s):  
Piotr Siuda
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Future Research ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Traditional Religion ◽  
Dynamic Nature ◽  
Visual Frame

Today, it is challenging to separate online and offline spaces and activities, and this is also true of digital religion as online and offline religious spaces become blended or blurred. With this background, the article explores the need for new typologies of what is religious on the Internet and proposes a conceptual framework for mapping digital religion. Four types of that which is religious on the Internet are presented based on influential classification by Helland. He introduced (1) religion online (sites that provide information without interactivity) and (2) online religion (interactivity and participation). Helland’s concept is developed by, among others, adding two types: (3) innovative religion (new religious movements, cults, etc.) and (4) traditional religion (e.g., Christianity or Islam). Each type is illustrated by selected examples and these are a result of a larger project. The examples are grouped into three areas: (1) religious influencers, (2) online rituals and (3) cyber-religions (parody religions). Additionally, the visual frame for mapping digital religion is presented including the examples mentioned. The presented framework attempts to improve Helland’s classification by considering a more dynamic nature of digital religion. The model is just one possible way for mapping digital religion and thus should be developed further. These and other future research threads are characterized.

scholarly journals GENERAL LEGAL AND THEORETICAL ASPECTS OF COUNTERING RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (5) ◽  
pp. 673-680
Author(s):  
V.E. Zvarygin ◽  
A.S. Kondakov
Keyword(s):  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Traditional Religion ◽  
Religious Philosophy ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
Religious Extremism ◽  
Main Emphasis ◽  
Emerging Issues ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The main problems and philosophical issues of countering religious extremism, as well as emerging issues of religious philosophy and metaphysics are revealed. A comprehensive analysis of the problem of religious extremism in various aspects is carried out from the standpoint of law, philosophy, political science, psychology, sociology. The philosophical essence of religious extremism is established as a violation of socially acceptable behavior and established relations. Variants of human behavior after interaction with traditional religion and new religious movements are considered. Levels of destructiveness of religious extremism, methods and ways of counteracting it are revealed. The essence of states controlled by extremist-minded leaders is analyzed. It is noted that in most scientific works the problematic issues of manifestations of religious extremism are studied in the context of political, legal and socio-philosophical manifestations, as well as from the relationship of religious philosophy and metaphysics, and when defining the concept of religious extremism the main emphasis is made on principles of law and politics with application of base categories of ideology.

scholarly journals The articulation between evolutionism and creationism in New Religious Movements: Two South American case studies

2020 ◽  
pp. 179-194
Author(s):  
Vitor Campanha
Keyword(s):  
Biological Evolution ◽  
New Age ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
The Internet ◽  
South American ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Religious Perspectives ◽  
American Case

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how certain religious perspectives present nuances between the concepts of creation and evolution. Although public debate characterizes them as polarized concepts, it is important to understand how contemporary religious expressions resignify them and create arrangements in which biological evolution and creation by the intervention of higher beings are presented in a continuum. It begins with a brief introduction on the relations and reframing of Science concepts in the New Religious Movements along with New Age thinking. Then we have two examples which allows us to analyze this evolution-creation synthesis. First, I will present a South American New Religious Movement that promotes bricolage between the New Age, Roman Catholicism and contacts with extraterrestrials. Then, I will analyze the thoughts of a Brazilian medium who disseminates lectures along with the channeling of ETs in videos on the internet, mixing the elements of ufology with cosmologies of Brazilian religions such as Kardecist spiritism and Umbanda. These two examples share the idea of ​​the intervention of extraterrestrial or superior beings in human evolution, thus, articulating the concepts of evolution and creation. Therefore, in these arrangements it is possible to observe an inseparability between spiritual and material, evolution and creation or biological and spiritual evolution.

Disaffiliation and New Religious Movements

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Currie
Keyword(s):  
Role Theory ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
Interdisciplinary Perspective

In this chapter, I examine the academic literature on disaffiliation from an interdisciplinary perspective, most notably scholarship in sociology, psychology, and religious studies. I begin briefly with deconversion, due to its close—and often conflated—association with disaffiliation, followed by an overview of key disaffiliation literature, including the development of causal and role theory approaches. I then discuss the “cult controversy” phenomenon and post-involvement attitudes of former members that featured prominently in early NRM scholarship. I conclude with a discussion on methodological prospects for future research on disaffiliation and NRMs.

Media, Technology, and New Religious Movements

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shannon Trosper Schorey
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Information Control ◽  
Media Technology ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Significant Distinction ◽  
Media And Technology

Since the first edition of theOxford Handbook of New Religious Movements(2004), the growing field of media, religion, and culture has moved at a rapid clip. The previous emphases on theoretical approaches that imagined a significant distinction between online and offline practices has been largely replaced by approaches that attend to the entanglement of digital and physical worlds. Research within this new analytical turn speaks about the Internet and religion in terms of third spaces, distributed materialities or subjectivies, and co-constitutive histories and locations. Highlighted within these works are the negotiations and intersections of consumer practices, popular culture, information control and religious pluralism online. As the field continues to develop, theoretical approaches that emphasize entanglement will help disclose the various relationships of power by which the material practices of religion, media, and technology are produced - allowing scholars to trace robust histories of multiplicity by which the contemporary imaginaries of religion, media, and technology are inherited.

Staying after Class

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 80-93
Author(s):  
Megan Goodwin
Keyword(s):  
San Diego ◽  
San Diego County ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Santa Fe ◽  
Group Methods ◽  
Heaven's Gate ◽  
Material Form ◽  
Insight Into

In March 1997, Marshall Herff Applewhite (Do) and thirty-eight of his students made headlines when they exited their human bodies in a home in Rancho Santa Fe in San Diego County, California. While the class (as they called their group) is gone, the legacy of Heaven’s Gate remains on the Heaven’s Gate website preserved by Mark and Sarah King. These two former members shared their experiences in the class at the New Religious Movements Group Methods Meeting on 21 November 2014 in San Diego at the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting. Their presentation and participation in a question-and-answer session provided insight into the complex, ambiguous legacy of Heaven’s Gate: a group that strove for existence beyond the materiality of human bodies now survives on Earth in material form, disseminated by human persons dedicated to preserving the teachings of Do, and his mentor Ti (Bonnie Lu Nettles) in a dynamic, ephemeral space—the internet.

Democratic Deliberation in Online Consultation Forums

2010 ◽  
pp. 263-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Y. Wang
Keyword(s):  
Research And Development ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Civic Participation ◽  
Future Research ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Democratic Deliberation ◽  
Online Consultation ◽  
Overall Effectiveness

This chapter examines the extent to which the Internet can represent a place for negotiation, consensus building, and civic participation using Singapore’s online consultation portal and the debate over the decision to build the nation’s first casino resort as a case study. The structural design of the consultation portal and the entire content of a discussion thread with 508 posts were analyzed with a conceptual framework drawn from previous studies of democratic deliberation. Findings suggest that while the forum reflects some criteria for deliberation, the lack of transparency and government participation raises the question over the quality of the discourse and overall effectiveness of this online medium. Current challenges, recommendations, and directions for future research and development are discussed.

scholarly journals "EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED": NETWORKED CONSPIRITUALITY IN NEW AGE MEDIA

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleena Chia ◽  
Jonathan Corpus Ong ◽  
Hugh Davies ◽  
Mack Hagood
Keyword(s):  
New Age ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Internet Studies ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Formal Quality ◽  
Inner Self ◽  
Power And Powerlessness ◽  
New Age Spirituality

Conspirituality refers to the confluence of New Age spirituality and conspiracism that frame reality through holistic thinking—connecting events and energies, the inner self to the outer world in unseen ways. Conspirituality has thrived online: between the pleasure of the weekly horoscope and the obsession with the QAnon drop is a mode of causal promiscuity in which, as Q puts it, “future proves past.” This panel traces forms of conspirituality from MAGA mystics to New Age influencers, from technolibertarian imageboards to Silicon Valley vision quests. While conspirituality marks an online psychographic segmentation, it also traces a formal quality that organizes ways of navigating, knowing, and critiquing the internet, which is undergirded by New Age spirituality’s perennialism: a belief that different spiritual traditions are equally valid, because they all essentially worship the same divine source that emanates throughout the cosmos and the human body. The internet supercharges perennialism, providing a connective medium for New Age ideology of manifesting: the belief that we create our own reality. As users trawl the internet for snippets and statistics to feed their confirmation bias and populate their vision boards, the connective medium of the internet manifests toxicity and misinformation at scale. The papers in this panel develop a line of research on the coevolution of spirituality and technology from organized to new religious movements. Instead of demystification, we use ethnographic, textual, and hermeneutic approaches—examining internet users, governance, genealogies, and internet studies itself—to politicize networked conspirituality as vernacular theories of power and powerlessness.

Conversion

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
George D. Chryssides
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Special Interest ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
New Members ◽  
Self Discovery

The chapter explores explanations for conversion to new religious movements (NRMs). Rather than sudden episodic conversion, joining an NRM can be attributed to self-discovery, following a schism, or pursuing a special interest within a religious organisation. There are definite patterns of conversion in NRMs, and notably a disproportion of Jews who join. It is argued that key factors include availability for the requisite lifestyle, and the gaining of “compensators” that the NRM offers. A further factor is offering religious experience and a forum in which to discuss it. The author explores the role of the Internet in conversion, arguing that it accounts the rise of “invented religions”, but otherwise has limited bearing on gaining new members. Finally, the religions themselves undergo change as new converts espouse them.

Democratic Deliberation in Online Consultation Forums

2012 ◽  
pp. 24-49
Author(s):  
Kevin Y. Wang
Keyword(s):  
Research And Development ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Civic Participation ◽  
Future Research ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Democratic Deliberation ◽  
Online Consultation ◽  
Overall Effectiveness

This chapter examines the extent to which the Internet can represent a place for negotiation, consensus building, and civic participation using Singapore’s online consultation portal and the debate over the decision to build the nation’s first casino resort as a case study. The structural design of the consultation portal and the entire content of a discussion thread with 508 posts were analyzed with a conceptual framework drawn from previous studies of democratic deliberation. Findings suggest that while the forum reflects some criteria for deliberation, the lack of transparency and government participation raises the question over the quality of the discourse and overall effectiveness of this online medium. Current challenges, recommendations, and directions for future research and development are discussed.

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