Papers by Mark MacWilliams
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Religious Studies Review, 2007
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Religious Studies Review, Sep 1, 2013
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Journal of Japanese Studies, 2014
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Religious Studies Review, Mar 1, 2009
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Monumenta Nipponica, 2006
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Religious Studies Review, Sep 22, 2010
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Religious Studies Review, Mar 1, 2016
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Monumenta Nipponica, 2013
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Religious Studies Review, Dec 1, 2009
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Religion, Oct 1, 2002
The topic of this symposium is timely for a number of reasons. First, there is the Internet itsel... more The topic of this symposium is timely for a number of reasons. First, there is the Internet itself, which, especially in the last ten years, has become increasingly an important medium for human experience and expression. According to the PEW Internet and the American life Project, to take one national case study, over three million Americans accessed the Internet every day for spiritual and religious purposes in 2001, up from two million users the previous year, and over 25% of Internet users overall have also done so at one point or another (see Larsen 2001, p. 1). In short, computer mediated communication (CMC) is a major arena for religious life—a place to access information, to post prayer, travel to sacred sites, do darsan before virtual images, and so on. The second reason is that, as Internet use grows, the way it is being used is transforming the way people ‘do’ religion. A case in point comes from my own Religious Life of Japan class. One day, when I had a representative of Soka Gakkai International visiting, the topic of the ‘Gohonzon’, Nichiren’s sacred mandala of the title of the Lotus Sutra that is used for worship in the various Nichiren Buddhist sects, came up for discussion. Our SGI speaker mentioned that, since it was considered extremely sacred, SGI members housed theirs in their home altar and only displayed it privately for devotional chanting. But then one of my students raised her hand and told him that this was not true, for she had found a Gohonzon on the Internet. Sure enough, the student showed us a ‘prayer Gohonzon’ from the American Independent Movement, a Buddhist group unaffiliated with SGI (http://campross.crosswinds.net/ Kaikan.html). This Internet site offers a virtual altar with a fully displayed Gohonzon, twinkling lighted candles before it, and the chant ‘Namu Myoho Renge Kyo’ flashing syllable by syllable on the screen. It seemed a perfect place to pray virtually. However, it was not so for our speaker who was very upset by what he saw and declared that such a public display of the Gohonzon was sacrilegious. It was then that I realised the power of the Internet to transform religious practice with virtual prayer, to challenge real life ecclesiastical organisations by downloading a Gohonzon from the site without SGI’s approval, and to cause religious conflict by displaying the Gohonzon online, which was religiously wrong for some, religiously fine for others. A third reason for the symposium is that it represents a second wave of academic studies that owes much to the work of previous scholars. The seminal work on religion on the Internet by Brenda Brasher, Margaret Wertheim, Jeffrey Zalesky, Stephen O’Leary, and others has inaugurated a new sub-field in religious studies. Cyberspace, along with real world space, has become a new frontier of religious life that is open to scholarly investigation. The articles of this symposium mainly come from two panels on ‘Cyberspace as Sacred Space’ and ‘The Virtual Frontier: Transforming Power and Identity in the Electronic Dimension of Religion’ that were given at the XVIIIth Quinquennial World Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions in Durban, South Africa in August 2000. Christopher Helland’s essay comes from another conference, sponsored by the Department of the History of Religions at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, ‘Religious Encounters in Digital Networks: Religion and Computer-Mediated-Communication’ in November 2001. I would like to thank the
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Numen, Jun 8, 2015
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Religious Studies Review, Mar 1, 2017
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Religious Studies Review, Mar 1, 2017
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Religious Studies Review, Dec 1, 2015
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Religious Studies Review, Apr 1, 2006
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Religious Studies Review, Jul 1, 2006
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Religious Studies Review, Jul 1, 2006
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Religious Studies Review, Dec 1, 2008
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Religious Studies Review, Mar 1, 2015
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Papers by Mark MacWilliams