Godwired

Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality

By: Rachel Wagner

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eText | 12 March 2012 | Edition Number 1

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272 Pages

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Godwired offers an engaging exploration of religious practice in the digital age. It considers how virtual experiences, like stories, games and rituals, are forms of world-building or "cosmos construction" that serve as a means of making sense of our own world. Such creative and interactive activity is, arguably, patently religious.

This book examines:

the nature of sacred space in virtual contexts
technology as a vehicle for sacred texts
who we are when we go online
what rituals have in common with games and how they work online
what happens to community when people worship online
how religious "worlds" and virtual "worlds" nurture similar desires.

Rachel Wagner suggests that whilst our engagement with virtual reality can be viewed as a form of religious activity, today's virtual religion marks a radical departure from traditional religious practice - it is ephemeral, transient, rapid, disposable, hyper-individualized, hybrid, and in an ongoing state of flux.