Online - Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet
Online ist eine internationale, Peer-Review-geprüfte Open-Access-Zeitschrift, die am Institut für Religionswissenschaft der Universität Heidelberg erscheint. Die Herausgeber haben sich zum Ziel gesetzt, wissenschaftliche Forschung an der Schnittstelle von Religion und Internet zu fördern und die Forschung in diesem Feld theoretisch und methodisch voranzubringen.
Institute for Religious Studies, University of Heidelberg
Firmly grounded in Christian theological spirituality (Evagrius Ponticus) and doctrine (Gregory the Great, Thomas Aquinas), the concept of the seven deadly sins, although the exact sequence and names may differ slightly, can be traced from Dante’s Divine Comedy and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to David Fincher’s famous film Se7en and multiple video games, such as The Binding of Isaac, Dante’s Inferno, and the already mentioned Darksiders III. An interesting ingredient of the several cultural depictions of the seven sins in past and present, is that the presentation of their physical form (aesthetics) and the words they utter (rhetoric) is very often closely connected to the specific sin they are supposed to represent. In this process of representation, and especially personalisation, the sins are made into characters with specific traits that mirror their theological identity. Lust, for example, is commonly presented as a beautiful woman, while gluttony is represented as an individual indulging in gastronomical orgies, and so forth. In this article, I want to argue that, within the specific field of digital games, the seven deadly sins are personalised on two levels: (1) essential personalisation – the presentation of the sins reflects their own immoral identity; and (2) characteral personalisation – the presentation reflects the protagonist’s negative character traits. To do so convincingly, I will start with introducing the concept of the seven deadly sins within their proper context of the Christian (theological) tradition. Next, I will introduce and analyse the four case studies – Diablo III, The Binding of Isaac, Dante’s Inferno, and Darksiders III – focusing on the topic of the representation and personalisation of the seven deadly sins within the games. After building a synthesis based on the analysis of the case studies in order to illustrate the two levels of personalisation, I will finish with some final remarks.
Copyright (c) 2020 Online - Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet
Understanding a videogame requires attention to the social dimensions of its production, its material form and its reception. Games are produced in communities of designers, played by communities of gamers, and accepted into families, households, and other communal settings. Christian games have often been designed with this wider community context in mind, advertised to families and churches as products that can help attract and retain new audiences. This article focuses on the children’s videogame Guardians of Ancora (GoA), produced by the Christian organization Scripture Union in 2015. We will use an interview with the product developer to explore the intent behind the game, and we will use an interview with a British volunteer at ‘St. George’s Church’ to discover how the game has been used within a Christian community. GoA incorporates a degree of procedural rhetoric (Bogost 2007) into its design, but St. George’s invites children to engage with the game’s story and world in the context of a week of crafts, songs and other volunteer-led activities. Scholars of digital religion have long been fascinated by the relationship between online and offline religion, and the study of the social context of religious gaming offers a new way to approach this classic theme.
Copyright (c) 2019 Online - Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet
This article examines the role of media in the process of religious communalization (Vergemeinschaftung), drawing on the example of the Evangelical Association of Vineyard Churches. It argues that a direct connection between media production, media use, and integration in the community is too shortsighted. Instead, the empirical study will demonstrate how different media – including those produced by various Vineyard churches – circulate in a specific milieu. It is within this milieu, with its constellation of local celebrations, Bible studies and regional events, that the members of Vineyard churches (re)construct their religious belonging in a complex interplay of face-to-face and media-based communication. In the end, the analysis highlights the multilayered role of media within and beyond the Association of Vineyard Churches and provides a contribution to the conceptual clarification of ‘community’.
In this article, we examine the question of religious communalization on the micro-blogging service Twitter. Twitter has only relatively recently been adopted as a field of research by scholars of media and religion, and the question of religious community building on Twitter has yet to be addressed. Along with conceptualizations of Twitter as a social network and a social medium, we present specific approaches to community and the emergence of communal identity. Drawing on theories of community building online as well as offline, this study emphasizes mediated communication as central in the formation of community. Finally, through an analysis of postings under the hashtag #WhatBritishMuslimsReallyThink, we outline how Twitter is used for event-based communication and emotional affiliation. In this way, Twitter is conceptualized as a digital space in which fleeting communities may emerge in the process of communicative event communalization.
Monasticism is characterized by community life in a specific place (stabilitas loci), but also by local and translocal networks that correspond to different functions of the monastery (religious, cultural, commercial, etc.). Although Max Weber describes monasteries as out-of-the-world institutions, most monastic communities (at least male ones) have Internet access and an online presence now. The use of digital media in monastic life raises a number of questions: What impact does it have on the community life of monks and nuns? Can it jeopardize the quality of community life? Regarding the external communication of the monastery, does its online presence allow the monks to extend the community beyond the cloister? This paper analyzes the role played by digital media in monastic life on the individual and community levels, and on the monastery’s outside communication with various audiences.
Drawing on the example of Jehovah’s Witnesses, in this contribution I will explore the role of media in the production of religious commitment. I will argue that, while providing important insights into the relationship between media interpretation and media use, the popular concept of ‘religious-social shaping of technology’ (Campbell) risks producing an excessively uniform picture of an interpretive community. To outline a more dynamic conception of religious communities, I will introduce a theoretical framework derived from the emerging philosophical fields of collective intentionality and social ontology. In particular, I will draw on the philosopher Margaret Gilbert’s work on ‘joint intentions’ and sketch a frame for the analysis of Jehovah’s Witnesses, in their relationship with media and the Watch Tower Society, as parties in a ‘plural subject’.
This article – framed within digital religion studies – analyzes the online religious activities of a non-denominational Christian multisite church, LifePoint Church (LPC). A multisite church is a church with a central location that serves as a hub or production center for the church’s activities and service contents, which are distributed to multiple sites in different locations through video or webcasts. LPC is an international multisite church: it has five campuses: three in the United States, one in Bangkok, and another one in Brussels. The LPC Brussels campus serves as a case study to observe how communication technologies, in particular the Internet, are adopted by both pastors and members to recreate the same ‘sacramental environment’ across the five churches. Through online observation, interviews, and questionnaires, this research reveals two different usages of the Internet made by LPC. One usage is public, official, informative and formal, and is promoted by the Church’s leadership; the other is unofficial and is characterized by private and intimate communication among the Church’s members. The article will analyze in depth how the congregants create this informal communication, which intensifies group solidarity, members’ virtual religious practice, and group identity.
Since the rise of the Internet, traditional religious communities have either embraced or struggled with new media. At the same time, a significant number of believers turns to new media as a substitute for or supplement to offline communities. Researching these users raises some crucial questions that guide my contribution: Do these users find or build communities online and, if so, how do these communities differ from offline equivalents, and how can they be grasped theoretically? Based on findings from a quantitative survey among Christian Internet users, I will first illustrate the emergence of personal relationships among Internet discussion board users and their perception of an actual online community. Then, based on qualitative research, I will elaborate three types of community existing within the discussion boards. Relating these types to classical (Weber, Tönnies) as well as recent (Anderson, Hitzler, Hepp) theoretical approaches to community, I will argue that the characteristics of social media do not unidirectionally determine any specific kind of community online. Rather, the needs of users as well as their offline religious affiliations are decisive and result in a broad range of online communities that can mirror such traditional forms as the Dorfgemeinschaft, as well as more recent types such as imagined or posttraditional communities.
The Dynamics of Religion, Media, and Community
This article introduces the special issue, “The Dynamics of Religion, Media, and Community”. It examines the shifting faith in the concept of religious community in the social studies of religion and calls attention to the normative expectations connected to the rise of new forms of communities in the age of the Internet. Against this backdrop, it discusses strengths and weakness of selected approaches in the study of media and religion and suggests future research pathways to which the articles in the special issue provide important contributions.
VR Mediated Content and Its Influence on Religious Beliefs
This article discusses technical features and perspectives of current "Virtual Reality" (VR) technologies and their potential impact on religious beliefs. The arising questions should be assessed in regard to the use of hard- and software devices in religious educational contexts. While touching the history of VR only marginally, this article focuses on observations and considerations regarding the players’ and users’ personality development in the context of their socialization and enculturation. In addition, an insight to VR applications in the fields of education, training and psychotherapy is provided. Examples of research illustrate that today VR has become more than just a game or a tool for the visualization of objects and spaces. Can the technology, however, be used or applied in religious contexts? Would it give rise to new questions or can old questions be revised to facilitate a different approach? After a definition of the term and basic functions of VR are provided, perceptional and emotional aspects as well as questions concerning transitions and boundaries that actually exist between real and virtual reality are discussed. In individual practice, religiosity is mediated through objects, texts, rituals and community as well as certain expectations of believers, their duties and rights and, of course, through multipliers like clerics or teachers. However, are all of these necessary, existent or even realizable in VR? Ultimately, a few questions are asked about the different implications of religion in virtuality: how do rules and rites communicate? What is the role of fellowship? How are believers and non-believers depicted in VR? Who is included or excluded? Although the article cannot provide definitive answers in the face of a rapidly evolving technology, it would like to draw attention to important issues that can be harnessed in religious education and presumably also theology.
The study investigates how tenets, meanings and practices of Tibetan Buddhism are re-contextualized by non-Tibetan students of online courses offered by a major Tibetan Buddhist organization. The research adopts transcultural and translocal perspectives and aims to enrich the understanding of how Tibetan Buddhism is establishing itself globally through online facilities. A 'translocative' analysis, suggested by Tweed (2011) for the study of Buddhism, is employed as the main lens for analysing the online program’s closed forum discussions. The data analysis reveals general trends in the development of Tibetan Buddhism as a transnational religion, and invites an extension of Tweed’s (2011) model.
religion online; Buddhism in the West; Tibetan Buddhism; Buddhist postmodernism
Video Games Facilitating Discussions of Good and Bad Religion
Religion has often been a theme involving contradictory positions in popular culture. Whether we comprehend religion as explicit implications within products of popular culture, such as recognizable characters from known religions or through formations of implicit meanings regarding Christ- figure analogies, religion is commented on and discussed widely in popular culture (Forbes, p. 21, 2005; Love, p. 192, 2010). Video games can be seen as prominent platforms for today’s varying and influential cultural discussions. As John Storey has said, cultural products should be researched for the “ideological work that they do, not only for the work that they reflect”, which recognizes the significance and impact of the various cultural products around us (Storey, p. 3, 1996), including video games. This study addresses video games as facilitating and commenting on the state of religion by examining three mainstream video games: BioShock, BioShock 2 (Irrational Games 2007, 2011,) and Dishonored (Arkane Studios 2012). The primary research question concerns how religion is placed in these games, and what criticism and conclusions the games can provoke on matters relating to religion. Using qualitative game content analysis, this article focuses on how religion is commented on in the three aforementioned games by examining the player’s position and negotiation of possibilities in the game worlds. This study views video games as cultural critique regarding the question of what is good and bad religion.
religion, altruism, cultural commentaries, videogames, Bioshock, Dishonored
The Chinese born spiritual teacher “Dr. Zhi Gang Sha” makes up part of a growing global healers market and provides various techniques of purported ancient Chinese origin in his centres in Canada and in Europe. Most of his teachings belong to the vast and heterogeneous array of practices, methods, and beliefs which developed within the modern qigong scene that emerged in China in the second half of the twentieth century and spread into the West in close connection with the so-called “Traditional Chinese Medicine”. This article takes a look at a rather recent religious offspring with a particular focus on his innovative take on the internet. This approach has its roots in a specific history of the internet in the Chinese context which is commonly referred to as “cyber-sectarianism”. The movement founded and led by Zhi Gang Sha may be interpreted as a continuation of major techniques and strategies applied by cyber-sectarian movements which emerged during the 1990s and the 2000s.
Qigong, Traditional Chinese Medicine, global spirituality culture, contemporary China, trans-national aspects of qigong, religion and the internet
Dishonored is not only one of the most popular and original game series on the market, but from a religious point of view it has one of the most complex and original fictional belief systems. A character that particularly stands out is the Outsider, a mysterious divine-like entity that interacts with all main playable characters, giving them supernatural abilities and commenting on their choices. He inhabits a mysterious otherworld called Void, containing everything supernatural, chaotic, magical and irrational. The Outsider also indirectly affects the ‘human world’ by figuring in underground cults and their opponents, creating an interesting mosaic of religious teachings and struggles. In this article, we would like to examine the Outsider both in the context of the game lore and comparative religion studies, with emphasis on the analysis of his character and its parallels in world mythologies.
Digital games, Religious studies, Dishonored, cult, devil, Tezcatlipoca, Odin, inquisition
This article focuses on the differentiation between the two representations of Cloud Strife in Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. Investigating the presentation of the imagery of the hero, this article uncovers the aspects of the Hebrew Bible in the original game, then the adopted motifs from the Christian New Testament in the sequel movie. The article tracks through the journey of the hero with the original game focused on a promised land, the revelation of the purpose of the reluctant hero and focus on an enemy as an external force. Alternatively, the movie is shown to focus on the hero that knows a purpose, adopting the imagery of baptism and focusing on an enemy that becomes an internal force. The author argues that this differentiation results in Cloud existing as a hero with two causes, resting between the testaments of the game and movie.
Final Fantasy VII; Cloud Strife; Hero; Theology; Final Fantasy; Religion
RELab digital – Ein Projekt über religiöse Bildung in einer mediatisierten Welt (Deutsch)
Bildung allgemein partizipiert an sich global vollziehenden medialen Transformationsprozessen. Religionspädagogik und –didaktik sind, wie alle anderen Fachwissenschaften auch, herausgefordert, die Integration digitalvernetzter Medien in Theorie und Praxis zu konzeptionieren und zu reflektieren. Dies sollte in mindestens drei Dimensionen erfolgen: beim Lernen mit digitalen Medien, beim Lernen über digitale Medien sowie in der Einübung einer konstruktiv-kritischen Medienbildung. Das Projekt ist der Entwicklung, Erprobung und Evaluation von Lernszenarien im Religionsunterricht gewidmet und dient gleichzeitig dem Austausch mit außerschulischen religiösen Bildungsorten. In diesem Beitrag werden neben den didaktischen und fachwissenschaftlichen Zugängen zwei mögliche Sequenzen aufgezeigt: Virtuelle Realitäten (VR), die durch Abbildung der physischen Realität angereichert werden und somit virtuelle Expeditionen ermöglichen sowie die physische Realität, die durch virtuelle Schichten erweitert wird (AR) und somit Erfahrungsräume an bestehenden Orten erweitert oder ortsungebunden neue Lernorte entstehen lässt.
Copyright (c) 2017 Online - Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet
Pope Francis in Cairo - Authority and branding on Instagram
Instagram has become one of the most popular social media with over 400 million users worldwide. Instagram is especially designed for mobile use: taking photos, editing and sharing. Many religious and spiritual leaders do use Instagram and attract millions of followers. Religious leaders in the western society cannot legitimize their authority in the public sphere by referring solely to tradition or religious sources. The crisis of authority has resulted in a longing for strong and charismatic leaders. In a spiritual marketplace, new requirements are emerging for leadership. Leaders become personal brands with their own mythology, central message and media channels, adapted to the styles and symbols of popular culture. The aesthetic dimension has become crucial, since audiovisual communication can be mediated by the media technology of today. Pope Francis is one of the most prominent religious figures of today. In this paper, we will investigate how he uses Instagram to build a personal brand and how this relates to his authority, using the posts during his visit to Cairo as a case study. Mobile devices and apps play like Instagram pave the way for new audiences and new interactions between the religious leaders and their audiences. The importance of images for media personalities shows the importance of the aesthetic dimension of charismatic authority. This paper will offer new insights in studying the relationship between religious leaders and authority in a media age.
RELab digital - A Project on Religious Education in a Mediatized World
Education in general participates in globally occurring medial transformation processes. Religious Education and Didactics, like all other academic disciplines, are challenged to conceptualize and reflect the integration of digitally-networked media in theory and practice. This should happen in at least three dimensions: in learning with digital media, in learning about digital media, and in the development and practice of a constructive/critical media education. The project is dedicated to the development, testing, and evaluation of learning scenarios in Religious Education classwork, and also to facilitating an exchange with sites of religious education beyond the school context. Apart from didactic and discipline-specific approaches, this paper will show two possible sequences: First, virtual realities (VR) augmented by representations of physical reality, thus enabling virtual expeditions, and second, physical realities augmented by virtual overlays (AR), creating experiential spaces in existing locations or new, non-location-bound, learning sites.
‘Judaism to go’ - Hastening the redemption through Web 2.0
For the last seventy years, Chabad emissaries have been reaching out to Jews and spreading Judaism in a world of increasing indifference to Jewish law and tradition. Despite their strict Orthodox lifestyle, they are up to date broadcasting Judaism worldwide, with the most modern technology. They offer apps which localize the position of their users and inform them when it is time to light Shabbat candles. Wherever you are, Chabad.org tells you where to find the next Chabad house to spend the Shabbat evening or to be part of the service. Modern smartphones seem to have created the possibility to reach Jews worldwide and thereby fulfilled an important campaign of the group: Reaching out for redemption. On the other hand, the ability to use smart phones everywhere offers the possibility for less observant Jews to be part of a Jewish community connected through Web 2.0. The paper explains how social media provides the possibility to unite different opinions and sections of Judaism.
Mobile Liturgy - Reflections on the Church of England’s Daily Prayer App
Technologies used to represent texts are not hermeneutically neutral. Since technologies have illocutionary force, we should ask of any text, whether print or digital, In what ways are the associated technologies conveying meaning? In this article, the question will be asked of liturgical texts. For the past few years, the Church of England has published some of its Common Worship liturgical resources, including Daily Prayer and the Common Worship Lectionary, as mobile Android and iOS apps. While the content of the resources is generally the same in its printed and digital forms, a number of interesting differences in how the resources can be used in these respective formats are apparent. Further, it is the contention of this article that these differences have discernable hermeneutical effects on the reader/user experience. After offering a framework for understanding the ways in which technologies influence the interpretation of their texts, this article will describe and interpret the differences between the print and digital versions of Daily Prayer. Finally, implications for users/readers and various other stakeholders in the religious apps space will be offered.
Learning with tablets in a church - Experiences of augmented reality in religious education
The research of AR –technology in learning has indicated promising results, such as increased content understanding and student motivation. However, difficulties are reported as well, for example attention tunneling and usability difficulties. (for a review, see Radu 2014) Religious buildings offer a rich and authentic environment for learning about religion and understanding the surrounding culture. In an experiment with elementary school pupils (age 11-12) we wanted to explore the possibilities of augmented reality in creating a holistic learning environment in a church. Augmented reality proved a versatile tool for learning about church, biblical texts and doctrinal contents as well as learning of 21st century skills. The experiment also pinpointed challenges that need to be taken into account when designing augmented reality learning environments in a church.
Pokémon Go - How Religious Can an Augmented Reality Hunt Be?
This article deals with the Augmented Reality (AR) smartphone game Pokémon Go which caused a hype among players in summer 2016. The author shows by citing results of an extensive online media search that various churches and religious communities reacted to the game, either praising or condemning it. In the beginning, the article will discuss the origin of the Pokémon series, showing that there are some parallels to Shintoism. When having a look at public reports about the game, it can be seen that some churches tried to profit from the AR game hype whereas others regard playing the game as blasphemous. Examples of both categories will be discussed. Players, however, have their own opinion about the game and so some communities have developed dealing with Pokémon Go as kind of religion of its own. Finally, the term techno-animism, its roots and consequences will be introduced.
Introduction to the special Issue "Religion to Go!"
Algorithmic Absolution: The Case of Catholic Confessional Apps
This article explores the Catholic ritual of confession as practiced through the use of mobile apps. Confession is a surprisingly persistent social form and in this article I begin by contextualising the relationship between society, confession and technology before presenting a case study of Catholic confessional apps that covers their design, marketing, and user feedback from review forums. This throws up a series of important questions about how we understand religious authenticity and authority in practices of faith that have a computational agent taking moral deviations as ‘data input’. How should we conceptualise these applications when an algorithm imparts absolution, when penance is assigned by computational code? Observing that most people do not question the automation of the confessional ritual and that users feel their use of confessional apps as entirely legitimate forms of religious practice, I argue that questions of authenticity are secondary to those of authority. In the traditional Sacrament of Penance a priest, acting in persona Christi as the minister of Christ’s mercy and drawing upon canonical law, recites the Rites of Penance, thereby performing the transition from the state of ‘penitent’ to ‘absolved’. The replacement of a priest with the silent logics of algorithmic automation has profound implications for the authoritative power of confession as a transformative ritual.
Copyright (c) 2016 Online - Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet
“And the Word Became Network”: An Analysis of the Circulation of the “Catholic” in Online Communicational Networks
Within the process of mediatization, the Catholic Church and society in general produce new modes of communication on the internet, in which there is a widespread network of relationships between symbols, beliefs, and practices linked to Catholicism, i.e., the “Catholic.” From this context, this paper analyzes the organization of the mediatic circulation of the “Catholic” in socio-digital platforms as Facebook. The theoretical reflection articulates studies on mediatization of religion, especially from the Latin-American perspective, and online communicational networks. The empirical analysis involves a multiple case study on Facebook, with focused semi-structured interviews with professionals of the Catholic communication in the Vatican and in Brazil, in three different levels: a Vatican institutionality (page Rádio Vaticano – Programa Brasileiro, the first presence of an office of the Holy See on Facebook); a socio-institutionality (page Jovens Conectados, a youth project promoted by the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil); and a peripheral minority (page Diversidade Católica, a Brazilian Catholic gay network). In conclusion, it identifies a social process of reconstruction of Catholic meanings, that emerges from a socially shared symbolic-religious know-how and power-of-doing, going beyond the action of the institutional Church or media corporations.
Pilgrim or Tourist? Modelling Two Types of Travel Bloggers
The typological distinction between pilgrims and tourists has often been drawn in tourism studies. This article aims at complementing this debate by applying computational techniques to analyse discourses in a corpus of blogs from the Dutch travel blog repository of waarbenjij.nu. The hypothesis is that pilgrims and tourists share notable similarities in their identity narratives. Several unsupervised computational methods are leveraged to analyse the corpora; they provide a cue for further interpretation, which relies on a directed close reading of indicated keywords. The analysis shows that pilgrims, instead of writing about sacred topics, focus on the same practical topics that tourists are invested in. Conversely, tourists show a notable sensibility to a range of highly valued, set apart experiences. The paper ends with the proposal for a new continuum to understand the distinction between pilgrims andtourists, based on the difference between condensed diversity and extended engagement.
Morality and Religion as factors in Age Rating Computer and Video Games: ESRA, the Iranian Games Age Rating System
ESRA, the Entertainment Software Rating Association, is the name of Iran’s computer games age rating system introduced in 2008 by its video game association IRCG. This new rating system is based on what this country deems as social, psychological and religious norms and values and is the only games age rating system in the Middle East. It is now by far the most developed age rating system in the Muslim world that is based on the Islamic laws. But based on what criteria is this system working – compared with other systems like USK or IARC? What procedure games go through before being classified and labeled? What have been the effects of the Islamic rules on the rating of the video games? What are the merits and demerits of this relatively new system?
Jewish, Christian and Islamic in the English Wikipedia
In order to study how Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are represented in Wikipedia, I use corpus linguistics tools to extract the adjective noun collocates of the adjectives Jewish, Christian, and Islamic from the 2013 English Wikipedia in order find out their semantic prosody. I then rank the positive and negative noun collocates using the logdice scores in order to find whether there is a statistically significant difference between them. In the case of negative nouns, an ANOVA test found a statistically significant difference. Pair-wise comparisons suggest that Islamic is more negative than either Christian or Jewish while there is no statistically significant difference between Jewish and Christian. On the positive side, there is no statistically significant difference between the adjectives. Intra-adjectival comparisons suggest that there is no statistically significant difference between Islamic’s positive and negative collocates while both Christian and Jewish are more positive than negative.
The Design of Educational Materials for Teaching the Most Common Religions to Students in their Final Year of Primary School: A Cross-Curricular Approach of Religious Studies and Music, Through the Use of Augmented Reality
The aim of this research is to establish whether teaching approaches based on the use of Augmented Reality (AR) facilitate deeper and more engaging learning. The religions of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and their sacred musics were taught through an interdisciplinary methodology. Qualitative research was conducted with a sample of 34 final-year, Greek primary school students. The syllabus and teaching conditions were identical for all students. However, the experimental group was taught using educational materials designed on the Aurasma AR application. The research findings suggest that the use of AR supported deeper and more engaging learning, confirming the limited relevant findings in international literature.
Facebooking Religion and the Technologization of the Religious Discourse: A Case Study of a Botswana-based Prophetic Church
Technologization of discourse is generally conceptualized as a process of influencing people’s way of thinking through the use of certain linguistic strategies. In this process, power is exercised through the use of linguistic strategies that shape the construction of identity as well as socio-religious vision. This study analyzes the ways in which certain linguistic strategies and religious discourses used in Facebook posts, reviews and comments on a religion-based Facebook page create and shape the narratives of religious authority, religious identity and religious community. Using the Facebook page of a popular prophetic Christian church in Botswana, Gospel of God’s Grace (3G Ministries), as a case study, this study examines the following questions: in what ways can an active religion-based Facebook page reconfigure and provide a platform for religious practice? To what extent does the use of various linguistic strategies inform and shape religious discourses found in various Facebook postings and comments? And how does a religious Facebook page provide a venue for the discursive interpretation of religious authority, the negotiation of religious identity and the development of socio-religious vision?