-
Recent research highlights the growth of alternative religious leadership on a global scale. In response, social media have emerged as platforms to compete for religious primacy. Accordingly, the study asks how is online religious authority constructed, re-affirmed and implemented by religious organizations? We contend that through online means, religious organizations are nowadays working to construct…
-
Digital technology became a substantial component of daily life activities where people grew less dependent on the constraints of the physical world. Recent developments of new media platforms have led to important changes in religious practices, resulting in digital religion. However, there is a lack of empirical research assessing the effect on the spiritual experience.…
-
The Catholic Church has been moving into a new phase, one where its congregation can choose to meet and practice elements of their own version of their faith on online forums. This new form of congregating allows for an individualised faith to manifest itself outside of the usual church authority structures. Online Catholic Communities provides…
-
Through an array of detailed case studies, this book explores the vibrant digital expressions of diverse groups of Muslim cybernauts: religious clerics and Sufis, feminists and fashionistas, artists and activists, hajj pilgrims and social media influencers. These stories span a vast cultural and geographic landscape-from Indonesia, Iran, and the Arab Middle East to North America.…
-
The ways in which some Hindu women use Facebook in the French overseas department of La Reunion suggest an intrinsic relationship between religion and media, not only in the sense of religious mediation, but also as mediation between their aspirations and achievements in terms of religious knowledge, gender roles, and social status. While their Facebook…
-
Ever since cartoons were created as a medium of political and social commentary, they have been used to both criticize and uplift religious communities. The anti-Catholic cartoons of Thomas Nast and Jack Chick are easily recognizable, but interestingly, among twenty-first-century Catholic communities in Europe and the United States, Catholics themselves have been creating caricatures of…
-
Many studies have mentioned the significance of the online petition platform CitizenGo.org in mobilizing a transnational network of right-wing extremist groups and disseminating their ‘anti-genderist’ agenda. However, the specific discursive practices employed in the online petitions remain underexamined. In the current study, we bridge this gap by combining corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. Following…
-
As the availability and use of media platforms continue to expand, the cultural visibility of religion is on the rise, leading to questions about religious authority: Where does it come from? How is it established? What might be changing it? The contributors to The Media and Religious Authority examine the ways in which new centers…
-
Media have become important arenas where religious institutions, alongside other players, articulate moral values and seek to shape societal norms and identities. Patriarch Kirill recognised early on the potential of using the media in spreading the Russian Orthodox Church’s mission and reaching out to wider audiences. From the very first days of his enthronement on…
