Now the Internet as the media channel is becoming the main mass media for religious organizations. This channel not only allows communities of believers to light their activity and to look for new adherents, but influences dogmas and religious practices, allows religious institutes to be more open and flexible in relation to life realities. Rituals in cyberspace have become one of the vivid expressions of social activity related to religion. Under the influence of the Internet some traditional religious practices can expand modes of the existence, forming new ways of cult activity. Pilgrimage is the most frequent online religious practice. This article discerns the phenomenon of pilgrimage online in the world web-net. The author conducts an analysis of the place of the Internet pilgrimage in the newly emerged system of religious practices in cyberspace. The first part of the paper is dedicated to the discussion of the terminology of the researched topic. It provides description of the main approaches to the study of online religious practices. In addition, the paper discusses the current trends in the Internet pertaining to the implementation of religious practices. The author briefly examines the quantitative data on religious practices performed in the Russian-speaking Internet (Ru-net) in order to demonstrate the growing interest of the population to the Internet as a platform for the implementation or performance of religious rituals. Estimates of this phenomenon of representatives of different religious traditions are given. Generally, the article devises the descriptive approach to highlight the existing gaps of the studied field in Russian and Kyrgyzstani science.
Keywords: Internet, pilgrimage, ritual, cyberspace, religion, virtual
DOI: 10.22250/2072-8662.2018.1.52-57
About the author
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Zulfiia Yu. Pavlichenko – Master of Arts in Religious Studies, Teaching fellow of the UNESCO Department on World Culture and Religious Studies, Kyrgyz-Russian Slavic University; 44-A Kievskaya str., Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, 720000; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. |