Godwired

This lively new book explores the way religious practice is changing in the digital age, and investigates the nature of sacred space, technology as a vehicle for sacred texts, who we are when we go online, how religious ritual works online and whether it is possible to gather for worship in online space.

Autorentext

Rachel Wagner is Associate Professor of Religion at Ithaca College, USA. Her work centers on the study of religion and culture, particularly religion and film and religion and virtual reality.

Zusammenfassung
Godwired offers an engaging exploration of religious practice in the digital age. It considers how virtual experiences, like stories, games and rituals, are forms of world-building or "cosmos construction" that serve as a means of making sense of our own world. Such creative and interactive activity is, arguably, patently religious.This book examines:the nature of sacred space in virtual contextstechnology as a vehicle for sacred texts who we are when we go online what rituals have in common with games and how they work onlinewhat happens to community when people worship onlinehow religious "worlds" and virtual "worlds" nurture similar desires.Rachel Wagner suggests that whilst our engagement with virtual reality can be viewed as a form of religious activity, today's virtual religion marks a radical departure from traditional religious practice - it is ephemeral, transient, rapid, disposable, hyper-individualized, hybrid, and in an ongoing state of flux.

Inhalt

1. Walkthrough 2. The Stories We Play: Interactivity And Religious Narrative 3. The Games We Pray: What Is This Ritual-Game-Story Thing? 4. The Other Right Here: In Search of the Virtual Sacred 5. Me, Myself and Ipod: Hybrid, Wired and Plural Selves 6. God-Mobs: Virtually Religious Community 7. What You Play is What You Do? Procedural Evil and Videogame Violence 8. Xbox Apocalypse: Video Games, Interactivity and Revelatory Literature 9. Making Belief: Transmedia and the Hunger for the Real 10. Expansion Pack