Sociology/Religion/Technology

In 2006, the United Church of Canada developed a website, WonderCafe.ca, that provided space for internet users to engage in discussions about religion and spirituality online. This website balanced user freedom to explore any topic of discussion with promoting the United Church to visitors. The website uses Web 2.0 technology, which gives internet users a great amount of freedom to shape the space that they participate in online. Using Kim Knott’s spatial analysis, this thesis explores the types of spaces created by the United Church and WonderCafe users.

On the web

An online peer-based spiritual mentoring program for field missionaries focused on improving the spiritual wellness of a group of twelve Protestant evangelical missionaries by means of a six-week blog. This study has been shaped by a wellness model of missionary member care in which wellness is understood to be a multidimensional integrated construct. Wellness is not merely the absence of illness or disease but involves a positive balanced life or a life of well-being in the spiritual, physical, emotional, intellectual, social, and occupational dimensions.

On the web

Through the use of narrative analysis, this research sought to analyze how the Catholic Church, arguably the world’s largest organization, represented itself through the use of its official online communications. Using framing and agenda-setting theories, the study examined the news subsidies of both the Vatican and U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

On the web

This paper explores the phenomenological and metaphysical implications of the increasing abstraction of online religion away from place into space within techgnosis – a form of Gnosticism inherent in modernity. In the phenomenon of “virtual pilgrimages” the location of the religious is transposed from its location in “body and place” to the “mind in space.” Drawing on theology and philosophy, the author concludes that this phenomenon is a consequence of capitalist modernity.

On the web

This paper seeks to understand and describe web searching patterns for Islamic and Qur’anic information, an area receiving little attention in past research. A mixed-methods approach has been taken to data collection utilizing both quantitative and qualitative techniques. Query logs collected in 2006 from the Microsoft Live search engine were analysed for Islamic-related terms. Characteristics such as query frequency, term frequency, query length, and session length were derived from the data.

On the web

Having physical access to a community and having a sense of community is not always an easy option for Third Culture Kids (TCKs) who live in a culture other than their parents’ native cultures such as missionary families and government and non-governmental agency workers located in various countries around the world. One TCK stakeholder (a co-author) decided to practice creating community and research by conducting a participatory action research project with a goal of engaging a subgroup of TCKs called missionary kids (MKs) to meet online and to create a sense of community.

On the web

This article seeks to probe the mystical imaginary present in digital networks from an online participatory study about the presence of the new age movement on the internet, especially the Brazilian context of the movement. The proposal is to experience on internet and through internet a mystical and virtual experience, creating a singular pathway through the network, capable of transmitting qualitative peculiarities of this presence and providing subsidies to the approach of part of the contemporary imaginary in relation to the sacred shared in digital networks.

On the web

This dissertation examines how online Christian communities reconcile the democratizing, anti-hegemonic effects of dialogic web tools, such as wikis, blogs, and video-sharing sites with the authoritarian characteristics of some organized religions. In the first chapter, I discuss technodeterminism and what I call the theme of "revolutionary architectures" in digital humanities scholarship.

On the web