Lo and Behold, the Sacredness of the Internet
Filmmaker Werner Herzog asks: “Does the internet dream of itself?”
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The Google Question of Evil
The slogan “Don’t be evil” prompts questions Google’s chairman seems ill-equipped to answer.
Read MoreReligion and Violence? Short Answer: “Religion” Does Not Exist in a Vacuum
It is patronizing to reduce religion to “ethics” or “values.”
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Was Islam Responsible for the Boston Bombings, or Was “Internet Islam”?
RD bloggers have rightly asked the question of the depth of the “piety” of the Tsarnaevs. That too misses a vital point. I do not for a moment discount the sincerity of the feelings for Islam by the Tsarnaev brothers. But, what Islam was the object of those feelings? I would offer that it was for an “Internet Islam”—for an abstract, compact, easily rendered Islam, fed by the representations flowing from out of the ether!
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The Internet is Not Killing Organized Religion
The theory that access to the internet will be the undoing of organized religion has resurfaced. But do the data show anything like this?
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Rage or Courage?: YouTube Terrorism Take Two
What is it about rage that pervades so much thinking about Islam? Start by picking up the latest issues of Time and Newsweek—America’s airport reading—and talking to Google.
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The Rabbis are Right to
Be Afraid
40,000 Hasidim vs. Internet.
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Web 8.0: The Return of the Human
Humanity may be a mystery, but what about the human who virtually enters a spec of dust and is able to learn the mysteries of dustness? Doesn’t this kind of leap require us to adopt a kind of awe and reverence for the mysteries outside the human as well?
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Virtual Book Burning and Its Consequences
The Gainesville event might be the final culmination of the age of hijackers, where a small group’s manipulation of a powerful vehicle has far-reaching disastrous effects. Only in this case, the vehicle is the Qur’an, not an airplane. And the manipulation need only be virtual. Never has book burning been so effective without even occurring. Symbolic actions on the internet and their consequences in the real world now occur almost simultaneously. And the threat of a symbolic gesture and an actual one become one and the same.
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Sacred Texting: When Religious Writ Gets Wired
The Vatican’s Web site considers a patron saint of the internet, Muslims debate divorce by text, and Jews pray by email; How does the inevitable transition to the virtual realm affect religious experience across the world?
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