Join the Holy Spirit on Zoom

The COVID-19 global pandemic impacted all social relations, including the way religious communities engage in worship services. Due to strict social distancing protocols, the only viable solution for many congregations was online worship. This article investigates how platforms in cyberspace, such as Zoom, can provide a substitute for the core religious practices found in physical worship services, particularly for African Pentecostal believers who rely heavily on the aesthetic and sensory experience of their religious environment. Drawing on the theoretical concept of affordance, it is argued that digital affordances such as the chat box and emojis are used by believers to communicate affective moments arising from the sensory experience of worship. Members of the congregation become ‘digital spiritual hype people’ who render support to leaders in order to create and regenerate an affective environment where the presence of the Holy Spirit can be felt. The Holy Spirit, a fundamental pillar for Evangelical Christians, is understood as an embedded presence within the digital infrastructure. The internet connection, the phone and computers and screens are all re-appropriated as spiritual tools through which miraculous healing can be dispensed to believers in need. This research stands at a critical juncture between what might be termed the ‘pre-COVID era’ and the ‘post-COVID era’. As vaccination plans continue to roll out and social distancing measures are slowly being lifted, a ‘post-COVID era’ for African Pentecostals means negotiating the boundaries between online and offline spaces to fulfil core religious practices.

Decolonising the COVID-19 pandemic

At its inception, the COVID-19 pandemic was described as something inherently new, capable of crossing and erasing the economic, racial, gendered, and religious divides that stratify societies around the world. However, the ongoing pandemic is not new or egalitarian, but fuelled by, and fuelling, crises already under way on a global scale. In this article we examine on the one hand the relationship between the pandemic and still-active formations of racialised and gendered power, and on the other the pandemic's inextricability from a dispersed and uneven planetary emergency. As the environmental historian Jason W. Moore notes, this emergency disproportionately affects ‘women, people of colour and (neo)colonial populations’ (2019: 54), and the effects of COVID-19 are similarly unevenly allocated.

‘The wrath of God on children of disobedience’

The arrival of pandemic diseases (of which COVID-19 is the latest, but not likely to be the last) could be understood, along with impending ecological disaster and global warming, to be the major existential threats envisioned by, and facing, our contemporary culture. This article focuses on the use made of the theme of COVID-19 in the theology and ideology of the Westboro Baptist Church – a Calvinist and Primitive Baptist church founded in Topeka, Kansas in the 1950s by Fred Phelps Sr (1929–2014). While numerically small, the church has become infamous through its practice of picketing funerals, and has been characterized as a hate group espousing antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ positions. Through a reading and analysis of sermons and other published materials from the Westboro Baptist Church, the article maps the motif of COVID-19 as it is used by a church whose members perceive themselves as the heralds of an angry God.

Trust in crisis

Crises are associated with a search for meaning and security. In recent years, they have also been associated with increased attention to conspiracy theories. Such theories about COVID-19 have been many. We have looked at several COVID-specific conspiracy theories and their relation to a number of other factors, including religiosity in a highly educated Norwegian convenience sample (n=1225). Conspiracy mentality, lack of trust, and religiosity were directly associated with conspiracy beliefs about COVID-19, whereas self-reported stress and negative emotions related to the pandemic had only small, indirect effects. Unlike previous research findings, we found no effect of gender or age.

New religious movement responses to COVID

New religious movements (NRMs) have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic in diverse ways, ranging from closely following mainstream public health recommendations to explicit rejection of such guidance. This article considers the manner in which NRMs have responded to the pandemic through analysis of groups’ ideological alignment with their host societies’ cultural and social frames. Extending the Bromley–Melton (2012) model of social alignment and the Rochford (2018) approach of frame alignment, the response of these NRMs must be contextualized in regard to alignment with broader social frames. The article considers specific cases of NRMs in South Korea, India, and the United States and posits that no single model can encompass NRM responses to the pandemic, but that multiple social factors provide guidance for understanding why and how NRMs responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Worship and the virus in Hindu India

The religious responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Hindu India were manifold and, at times, publicly contested, which raises the question of which societal differences became visible and were augmented as the pandemic unfolded. Based on observations mainly from the first coronavirus wave in 2020, this article argues that the limited religious innovation that ensued gave rise to a lively public debate that revealed marked differences within the Hindu community, that the pandemic offered new possibilities for affirming Hindu identities while othering Muslims, and that it accelerated the transition to online religious services in prominent temples while pausing the activities in others, thus augmenting a marked digital divide that may well outlast the pandemic. Pandemic religious changes notwithstanding, the article concludes that most of the changes were ephemeral and produced minor jolts rather than major transformations.

Minding the pandemic

This article analyses clusters of Muslim responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in a theoretical framework provided by the cognitive science of religion. The responses include theological reflections on the origin, nature, and religious significance of the disease, religious justifications for restrictions on communal worship, apologetics in the light of COVID-19, and how aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic relate to issues of purity, impurity, and contagion. This article places the responses in a wider theoretical context that contributes to explaining their emergence as cultural representations, and, as a consequence, may promote further comparative research into responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in other religious traditions.

Religious responses to the COVID-19 pandemic

Editorial of Approaching Religion, Vol. 11 Issue 2.

Tyra Kleen

The Swedish artist and writer Tyra Kleen (1874–1951) was a professional artist and a constant traveller who had a great interest in different religious questions. This article describes her Symbolist artistry, her interest in Theosophy and her journeys to India and Asia.

The painter Meri Genetz and the endless quest for spiritual wisdom

Meri Genetz (1885–1943) was a Finnish painter, esotericist, and a spiritual seeker. Around 1925, she began truly dedicating herself to spiritual seeking and started to make notes of her studies in black notebooks. This article will go through four of those notebooks which today offer a vivid picture of Genetz’s seeking between the years 1925 and 1943. In the beginning, Genetz acquainted herself with Gnosticism, Theosophy, and Kabbalah, as well as the works of Christian mystics, such as Emanuel Swedenborg and Jakob Böhme, the writings of, for example, Paracelsus, and texts attributed to the mythic figure Hermes Trismegistus. Gradually Genetz started to outline her own views, ideas, and theories regarding higher truth and spiritual wisdom. In the beginning of the 1930s her main quest came to be to find her ‘other half’ and become whole. She started attending Spiritualist séances, where she would ask about her other half and discuss the state of her soul, the souls of others, her art and marriage, and the books she had read. In time, Genetz’s quest for true wisdom and self-fulfilment became more and more restless and impatient. When she died in 1943, she was still seeking.