Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
Understanding a videogame requires attention to the social dimensions of its production, its material form and its reception. Games are produced in communities of designers, played by communities of gamers, and accepted into families, househ…
This article introduces the special issue, “The Dynamics of Religion, Media, and Community”. It examines the shifting faith in the concept of religious community in the social studies of religion and calls attention to the normative expectat…
Since the rise of the Internet, traditional religious communities have either embraced or struggled with new media. At the same time, a significant number of believers turns to new media as a substitute for or supplement to offline communiti…
This article – framed within digital religion studies – analyzes the online religious activities of a non-denominational Christian multisite church, LifePoint Church (LPC). A multisite church is a church with a central location that serves a…
Drawing on the example of Jehovah’s Witnesses, in this contribution I will explore the role of media in the production of religious commitment. I will argue that, while providing important insights into the relationship between media interpr…
Monasticism is characterized by community life in a specific place (stabilitas loci), but also by local and translocal networks that correspond to different functions of the monastery (religious, cultural, commercial, etc.). Although Max Web…
In this article, we examine the question of religious communalization on the micro-blogging service Twitter. Twitter has only relatively recently been adopted as a field of research by scholars of media and religion, and the question of reli…
This article examines the role of media in the process of religious communalization (Vergemeinschaftung), drawing on the example of the Evangelical Association of Vineyard Churches. It argues that a direct connection between media production…
Dishonored is not only one of the most popular and original game series on the market, but from a religious point of view it has one of the most complex and original fictional belief systems. A character that particularly stands out is the O…
The Chinese born spiritual teacher “Dr. Zhi Gang Sha” makes up part of a growing global healers market and provides various techniques of purported ancient Chinese origin in his centres in Canada and in Europe. Most of his teachings belong t…
The study investigates how tenets, meanings and practices of Tibetan Buddhism are re-contextualized by non-Tibetan students of online courses offered by a major Tibetan Buddhist organization. The research adopts transcultural and translocal …
This article discusses technical features and perspectives of current “Virtual Reality” (VR) technologies and their potential impact on religious beliefs. The arising questions should be assessed in regard to the use of hard- and software de…
This article focuses on the differentiation between the two representations of Cloud Strife in Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. Investigating the presentation of the imagery of the hero, this article uncovers the asp…
Religion has often been a theme involving contradictory positions in popular culture. Whether we comprehend religion as explicit implications within products of popular culture, such as recognizable characters from known religions or through…
This article deals with the Augmented Reality (AR) smartphone game Pokémon Go which caused a hype among players in summer 2016. The author shows by citing results of an extensive online media search that various churches and religious commun…
Technologies used to represent texts are not hermeneutically neutral. Since technologies have illocutionary force, we should ask of any text, whether print or digital, In what ways are the associated technologies conveying meaning? In this a…
For the last seventy years, Chabad emissaries have been reaching out to Jews and spreading Judaism in a world of increasing indifference to Jewish law and tradition. Despite their strict Orthodox lifestyle, they are up to date broadcasting J…
Education in general participates in globally occurring medial transformation processes. Religious Education and Didactics, like all other academic disciplines, are challenged to conceptualize and reflect the integration of digitally-network…
Instagram has become one of the most popular social media with over 400 million users worldwide. Instagram is especially designed for mobile use: taking photos, editing and sharing. Many religious and spiritual leaders do use Instagram and a…
Introduction to the special Issue “Religion to Go!”
Bildung allgemein partizipiert an sich global vollziehenden medialen Transformationsprozessen. Religionspädagogik und –didaktik sind, wie alle anderen Fachwissenschaften auch, herausgefordert, die Integration digitalvernetzter Medien in Theo…
The research of AR –technology in learning has indicated promising results, such as increased content understanding and student motivation. However, difficulties are reported as well, for example attention tunneling and usability difficultie…
The aim of this research is to establish whether teaching approaches based on the use of Augmented Reality (AR) facilitate deeper and more engaging learning. The religions of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and their sacred musics we…
Technologization of discourse is generally conceptualized as a process of influencing people’s way of thinking through the use of certain linguistic strategies. In this process, power is exercised through the use of linguistic strategies tha…
In order to study how Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are represented in Wikipedia, I use corpus linguistics tools to extract the adjective noun collocates of the adjectives Jewish, Christian, and Islamic from the 2013 English Wikipedia in …