RELIGION AND THE INTERNET: DIGITIZING THE SACRED

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY, FALL 2025
Religion and the Internet: Digitizing the Sacred: RLGN 236
T/Th 4:00-5:15, Mandel Center 107
Professor Alanna Cooper

 
Course Description
 
Religion offers a path for practitioners to connect to the Divine, join with community, and identify ultimate purpose.  Although these lofty aspirations operate on a spiritual plane, they are accessed via our physical world; through holiday feasts, houses of worship, ritual garb, dance and song.    Given the materiality of religious practice, the rise of the internet, extended reality and artificial intelligence has raised challenges and offered new possibilities for religious practitioners and their leaders.  In this course we will explore what happens when sacred spaces become virtual, when communal gatherings occur through avatars, and when holy texts are studied on-line.  Driving the course are pressing questions of meaning: What is the nature of the relationship between humanity and the transcendent; between the body and the spirit; and between our physical world and that which is virtual?  As we study various facets of digital religion in class, students will work towards a final creative research project, which focuses on ways that new technology is redefining sacred spheres.