by RobertHoward (Author)
In the 1990s, Marilyn Agee developed one of the most well-known amateur evangelical websites focused on the End Times , The Bible Prophecy Corner. Around the same time, Lambert Dolphin, a retired Stanford physicist, started the website Lambert's Library to discuss with others online how to experience the divine. While Marilyn and Lambert did not initially correspond directly, they have shared several correspondents in common. Even as early as 1999 it was clear that they were members of the same online network of Christians, a virtual church built around those who embraced a common ideology.
Digital Jesus documents how such like-minded individuals created a large web of religious communication on the Internet, in essence developing a new type of new religious movement-one without a central leader or institution. Based on over a decade of interaction with figures both large and small within this community, Robert Glenn Howard offers the first sustained ethnographic account of the movement as well as a realistic and pragmatic view of how new communication technologies can both empower and disempower the individuals who use them. By tracing the group's origins back to the email lists and Usenet groups of the 1980s up to the online forums of today, Digital Jesus also serves as a succinct history of the development of online group communications.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 223
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 25 Apr 2011
ISBN 10: 0814773109
ISBN 13: 9780814773109
Book Overview: Documents how like-minded individuals created a large web of religious communication on the Internet, in essence developing a new type of new religious movementoone without a central leader or institution
A forceful and judicious study of the doomsday predilections of Christian Fundamentalist websites. Digital Jesus is uniquely positioned as a long-term analysis that tracks affinities toward intolerance and exclusion while also highlighting online sites that incorporate a more embracive and deliberative set of beliefs.
-Lee Quimby,author of Millennial Seduction: A Skeptic Confronts Apocalyptic CultureOne of the best current scholarly contributions to be found on the complex, creative, inventive, evocative world of Internet religion. Howard offers new and exciting insights on the power of non-institutional Christian Fundamentalism....Mandatory reading for any scholar working to understand contemporary vernacular religion, as well as the ever-changing culture of religious communication. It is equally compelling for general readers trying to perceive the direction of Christianity in post-9/11 America.
-Leonard Primiano,Cabrini College