1st Edition
The Third Spaces of Digital Religion
This exciting volume explores how religious meaning is generated and performed in our present digital media ecosystem. It uses the spatial metaphor of a third space to visualize the mobility of everyday religion and to explore the dynamic ways in which contemporary subjects imagine, produce, and navigate new religious and spiritual places.
Comprised of seven original essays, this book provides a rigorous discussion of the complex intersections of the digital and religion, demonstrating how third spaces of religion stand out by virtue of their in-betweenness. They exist between private and public, between institution and individual, between authority and individual autonomy, between large media framings and individual "pro-sumption," and between local and translocal. Including probing analysis of how Muslim, Catholic, and Neo-Pagan identities are cultivated and developed online, case studies reflect on the creative outcomes of this condition of in-betweenness and the emergence of other places of religious and spiritual meaning.
Blending theoretical analysis with grounded empirical research, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of contemporary religion, media and religion, sociology of religion, religion, and popular culture.
1. Introduction: Media Theory and the Third Spaces of Digital Religion
Stewart M. Hoover and Nabil Echchaibi
2. Neda: Religious Manifestations of a Digital Martyr
Samira Rajabi
3. Identity, Confession, and Performance in PostSecret
Stewart M. Hoover and Rachael Liberman
4. Queer Muslim Identity in the Third Space of Tumblr
Kristin M. Peterson
5. The Sacred Tech: Identity, Aesthetics, and Practice in Neo-Pagan Digital Spaces
Giulia Evolvi
6. Facebook as a Third Space of Digital Catholicism: The "Catholic" in Circulation and Reconstruction
Moisés Sbardelotto
7. Rewriting Religion: How LGBTQ Individuals Are Finding a Place of Belonging Online
Patrick M. Johnson
Biography
Nabil Echchaibi is Associate Professor of Media Studies and Director of the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture in the College of Media, Communication, and Information at the University of Colorado Boulder. His work focuses on Muslim media, Arab cultural production and aesthetics, and decoloniality.
Stewart M. Hoover is Professor Emeritus of Media Studies and Director Emeritus of the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture in the College of Media, Communication, and Information at the University of Colorado Boulder. A theorist of media audiences and audience research, his research is located at the intersection of religion and modern media of communication.
