"Sacred Cyberspaces reveals how long-standing conflicts over power, influence, and legitimacy within religious organizations are being waged in the digital realm. Oren Golan and Michele Martini describe the tensions that arise as religious groups seek to reach the faithful in online spaces where tra ... ditional clerical authorities have less expertise and control. Focusing on the Catholic world, they examine the rise of devotional digital entrepreneurship and the roles of lay religious webmasters: the video makers, app developers, and web designers who devote their lives to evangelization and who literally run the show. The book also explores the nature of religious experience as it pivots to online platforms: cyberculture, prayer, ceremonies, pilgrimage, proselytization, and the relation to the transcendental. From live-streaming at world-famous sites in the Holy Land to the Instagram feed of Pope Francis, Sacred Cyberspaces evaluates the contemporary media strategies of the Catholic Church and sheds light on the future of religion online." (Publisher description) more

"In the last two decades, mainstream religious institutions have progressively incorporated ICTs in both their organizational infrastructure and their devotional practices. Stemming from digital religion scholarship, the present article aims at investigating how the official discourse of the Catholi ... c Church around media has transformed during the long transition from the mass to the digital media era. To this aim, the entire production of papal Encyclicals, Apostolic Exhortations, and World Communication Day addresses from 1967 to 2020 have been analyzed. First, texts were analyzed through a text mining software to identify and quantify the terms under scrutiny. Subsequently, an in-depth study around the evolution of the term “media” was conducted, including the selection and categorization of the term’s correlates and their ethical characterization. Data resulting from this double-layered analysis offer insights on the evolution of the relationship between the Catholic Church and the fast-changing world of media." (Abstract) more