Godwired: Religion, Ritual, and Virtual Reality

Godwired offers an engaging exploration of religious practice in the digital age. It considers how virtual experiences, like stories, games and rituals, are forms of world-building or "cosmos construction" that serve as a means of making sense of our own world. Such creative and interactive activity is, arguably, patently religious.

This book examines:

• the nature of sacred space in virtual contexts
• technology as a vehicle for sacred texts
• who we are when we go online
• what rituals have in common with games and how they work online
• what happens to community when people worship online
• how religious "worlds" and virtual "worlds" nurture similar desires.

Rachel Wagner suggests that whilst our engagement with virtual reality can be viewed as a form of religious activity, today's virtual religion marks a radical departure from traditional religious practice - it is ephemeral, transient, rapid, disposable, hyper-individualized, hybrid, and in an ongoing state of flux.