Brasher, B.E. (2001). Give me that online religion. Rutgers University Press: New Brunswick.

This is the Google Books link.

From Publisher’s Weekly:

How is cyberspace transforming American religion? Brasher, an independent religion scholar, believes that the Web’s new transcendence spells nothing short of a bona fide Reformation for religious traditions. Just as the printing press made possible the Lutheran Reformation, the explosion of cyberspace “brings with it a tidal wave of new spirituality that may sweep us all up in its path.” Brasher is a bit vague about the details of this sea change, believing that specific prognostications about the future of online religion are unwise since the technology itself changes so rapidly. She offers a few tantalizing tidbits based on a sampling of the more than one million faith-related Web sites that now exist. How about a Cyber-Seder? Or “repentance” Web pages where confessing Christians list their sins and then, with the click of a mouse, see them erased? Brasher expresses an informed ambivalence about the future of online religion, noting some of its positive points (e.g., the ability to enjoy the sacred anytime and from anywhere, and the increased potential for religious diversity) while elucidating its potential dark side. She asks whether disembodied cyberspace is genuinely capable of promoting religious community. Complementing the thoughtful text is a dramatic, Web-inspired layout that features graphics, curved pull-out quotes and hip background designs. While Brasher’s book is sometimes tentative, it bravely tackles a momentous new topic, and will be consulted by the many scholars who follow her cookie trail.

Hat tip to Paul Teusner’s article, New Thoughts on the Status of the Religious Cyborg (pdf), which he referenced in his interview for this column here.

“India’s first spiritual networking website.”

I spoke with Madhuri Khanduja, who launched the site in November 2010, when I was in Delhi in December. She has some crazy ideas about making spiritual ascension game-like, with badges:

For example Facebook wherein you can connect with your friends, listen to their updates, today you can follow people, understand what is the conversation going on.  For spiritual networking you can follow gurus, masters like Deepak Chopra, Ravi Shanka, Jaggi Vasudev, and you can come… you can understand their teachings, they’ll be answering your queries, wall updates and you’ll have badges for different levels. As you grow, as you enlighten in the spiritual world, you’ll have badges for them.

They’ve also got streaming yoga. For reals.

Wertheim, M. (1999). The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. W.W. Norton & Company.

This is the full pdf of this chapter from science writer Margaret Wertheim’s look at the almost ecclesiastical way we looked at the web in the years before the boom.

Publisher’s Weekly said:

In this serious and intriguing, if far-fetched, study, Wertheim (Pythagoras’ Trousers) argues that cyberspace gives us “a technological substitute for the Christian space of Heaven.” She explains that early Christians hoped to trade “the troubled material world” for the next one, where bodies would be perfected or disappear and “injustice and squalor” would vanish. Internet partisans make similar claims: in cyberspace everyone’s equal and nobody’s ugly. Christian theology, as espoused by medieval art and literature, imagined a place for bodies (this world) and a place for minds and souls (the next world). But modern science and modern thought (the Renaissance invention of perspective; Copernicus, Newton, Einstein) have explained and demystified physical space, leaving “no place more special than any other,” nowhere for us to imagine that souls can be. Wertheim discusses hopeful fictions of “hyperspace,” from H.G. Wells to Cubism to Star Wars, before turning (in chapter 6) to the Net, whose denizens?especially users of MUDS (multiple-user dungeons)?have, she contends, found a space for the soul online. This is, she adds, cause for both celebration and worry, since the “cyber-utopians” haven’t found a clear way to make cyberspace stand (as Heaven did) for an ethics. Wertheim is intent on explaining the Net’s meanings, not its workings. If her book belongs to one particular field, it’s the minuscule?but mushrooming?one in which literary and cultural critics consider Net phenomena. As such, it’s both provocative and worthwhile.

Read a review from Salon.com.

Hat tip to Paul Teusner’s article, New Thoughts on the Status of the Religious Cyborg (pdf), which he referenced in his interview for this column here.

by Gary Bunt (2009): UNC Press.

Gary Bunt’s homepage. Gary will be speaking in the afternoon session at the Faith 2.0 event on Thursday 14 April 2011 at the RSA in London.

Via @julaybib