Product Description

As the Internet and the World Wide Web overcome barriers of time and space, religion enjoys an ever-increasing accessibility on a global scale. Inevitably, people online have sought out encounters with the otherworldly, launching religion into cyberspace. In this compelling book, Brenda Brasher explores the meaning of electronic faith and the future of traditional religion. Operating online allows long-established religious communities to reach hearts and minds as never before. Yet more startling is the ease by which anyone with Internet access can create new circles of faith. Bringing religion online also narrows the gap between pop culture and the sacred. Electronic shrines and kitschy personal Web "altars" idolize living celebrities, just as they honor the memory of religious martyrs. Looking ahead, Brasher envisions a world in which cyber-concepts and -technologies challenge conventional notions about the human condition, while still attempting to realize age-old religious ideals such as transcendence and eternal life. As the Internet continues its rapid absorption of culture, Give Me That Online Religion offers pause for thought about spirituality in the cyberage. Religion's move to the online world does not mean technology's triumph over faith. Rather, Brasher argues, it assures religion's place in the wired universe, meeting the spiritual demands of Internet generations to come.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #758083 in Books
• Published on: 2004-05-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 203 pages

Publisher's Weekly
"Brasher's book....bravely tackles a momentous new topic, and will be consulted by the many scholars who follow her cookie trail."

Review
"One can find no better guide to cyberspace's impact on the complex passions and strivings of premodern, modern, antimodern, and postmodern humanity this brilliant, empathic, and unfailingly honest inquiry. Few writers on religion can combine critical acuity and great-hearted compassion the way Brenda Brasher does." - Richard Landes, director, Center for Millennial Studies, Boston University"

Wade Clark Roof, J.F. Rowny professor of religion and society, University of California at Santa Barbara
Takes on the important question on how a new technology is forcing us to look again at old and enduring religious themes, and does so in an imaginative and provocative manner.

Customer Reviews

Virtually sacred...
The author of this book, Brenda Brasher, got her Master of Divinity degree from my seminary prior to getting her doctorate at the University of Southern California. Brasher's earlier book, `Godly Women: Fundamentalism and Female Power', showed that she likes to push the envelope and go into subjects that are not without controversy. `Give Me That Online Religion' is another book like this - the whole idea of culture and society on the internet is riddled with controversial aspects. Far from being simply a new technology or a new and faster method of communication, the internet is transforming the very idea of communication in ways not thought of by even the most prophetic of observers and science fiction imaginations.

Brasher sees the realm of cyberspace as being the ultimate diaspora (she entitles one of her early chapters with this phrase) - people need no longer rely on physical proximity or geographic groupings for their associations; like the Jews of old, the community can be far flung and multicultural while maintaining certain key ties - one primary difference now being that the people involved in these virtual communities may never actually meet another person of their religious persuasion.

The ideas of authenticity (of communication, of individual truthfulness, and of actual spirituality) come to the forefront of much of Brasher's discussion, as questions about the validity of persons online and the reality of experiences that exist primarily or solely in virtual space are exposed. At what point does the virtue become a vice? While the internet is an incredible tool for the dissemination of information as has been available never before, it is also true that the number of questionable sites (ranging from the mildly prurient to the bizarre and violent) seems to multiply at an even faster rate. This same trend holds true in religion, in which there is sometimes no reality at all behind the words on the website. What kinds of values are being expressed and exposed?

Brasher compares the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales and Mother Teresa as a case study, comparing their media presence - particularly on the internet - against their actual lives and the grounding each had in certain communities and `real' life. Brasher locates the websites of celebrities such as these as pilgrimage sites similar to the old saintly sites of earlier times; they become important continuations of a celebrity's seeming power and influence.

Brasher speculates on some of the influences and trends for congregational life - that pastors and theologians grounded in an education influenced by agrian culture and pastoral concerns might find a difficult time in relating the modern technological-cultural issues to their communities. This is not to say that pastors and theologians are not technically savvy - many will have the latest computers with fast-speed internet access, palm pilots, cell phones and the like, but still not be able to adapt the changing trends these bring in society together with their more traditionally-based theological training.

Brasher ends by looking at the apocalyptic element online, not only with situations like the Heaven's Gate tragedy, but also the more general ministry portals run by evangelical and fundamentalist preachers such as Jack Van Impe, whose focus for ministry online (as well as in other media) seems to start with the prophetic apocalyptic message. She examines the potential and the pitfalls for future use of the internet in the religious field mystically, institutionally, and socially.

This is a fascinating text for any person in the twenty-first century, given that no matter where one is, the influence of the internet will be felt, and two so pervasive things like religion and the internet cannot help but be influenced by each other, one hopes for the better of both.

Stunning introduction into On-line religion!!
I teach a University course on "Mission and Culture" at the University of Lund in Sweden and, as the term approaches its end, searched for an interesting theme for one of my last lectures. Having focused on the propagation of the Gospel, through mission, in various cultures I searched for something treating religions in relation to the "new" Internet culture. This book gave tons of inspiration and insight and inspired me to lecture on On-line religion from a Swedish perspective. We had a fantastic classroom discussion and some students will now write short papers on the issue.