The July issue of the South Asian Popular Culture journal has two essays related to religion online.The July issue of the South Asian Popular Culture journal has two essays related to religion online. I copy their abstracts here and hopefully I can access the full articles soon. Desktop deities: Hindu temples, online cultures and the politics of remediation Madhavi Mallapragada Pages 109 – 121

This study examines Hindu temples on the Web by focusing on three key types, the temple homepage, the commercial puja site and the Hindu discourse site. It argues that Hindu temples sites demonstrate the emergence of what I call 'desktop deity culture,' constituted through the practices of digital darshan, online rituals and virtual Hinduism. These Web practices in turn exemplify the 'remediation' (Bolter and Grusin) of new media conceptualizations of digitality, network capital flows, hypertextuality and virtuality as they are articulated to ideas of the Hindu image, embodied ritual practice and the temporal and spatial logic of the temple as sacred place. Remediation in Bolter and Grusin's influential theorization of new media is a refashioning characterized by a 'double logic' whereby new media 'remediate and are remediated by their predecessors' (55). Hindu temple sites, I argue, are repurposing 'older' media forms such as photographs of deities, Hindu calendar art, the analog sacred texts and temple books, audio tapes of religious discourse through their textual and discursive practices of representing online temples. Likewise, aspects of digital media such as hypertextual connectivity, virtual forms of dis/embodiment and im/materiality and mobile flows of capital and culture are deployed to pay service to place-centric, embodied and material practices shaping Hindu temple cultures. In this remediation of Hindu representational forms and material practices with new media ideologies and practices, both Hindu temples and new media as cultural forms are reinvented as 'desktop deity cultures.'

Muslim punks online: A diasporic Pakistani music subculture on the Internet Dhiraj Murthy Pages 181 – 194

This article seeks to explore how Internet media is shaping transnationally-mediated South Asian music subcultures. Rather than serve as a literature review of new media and South Asian popular culture, this paper is especially interested in how particular music websites, discussion forums, social networking sites, and IP-based technologies in general are facilitating the creation of progressive South Asian virtual spaces. One particular South Asian musical scene, 'Taqwacore', a transnational Muslim punk music scene, is used as a case study. Reference is made to other non-Muslim diasporic South Asian musical scenes including Asian electronic music and Bhangra as well to contextualize Taqwacore. Ethnographic research (participant observation and interviewing) was conducted both online and offline using Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blogs, discussion groups, and face-to-face meetings.

Heidi Campbell posted a new entry on her blog in which she points out that The Atlantic has a piece in which an article is quoted that she co-authored. The article, written with Antonio C. La Pastina, appeared in the June issue of New Media and Society: How the iPhone Became Divine: New Media, Religion and the Intertextual Circulation of Meaning

This article explores the labeling of the iPhone as the ‘Jesus phone’ in order to demonstrate how religious metaphors and myth can be appropriated into popular discourse and shape the reception of a technology. We consider the intertextual nature of the relationship between religious language, imagery and technology and demonstrate how this creates a unique interaction between technology fans and bloggers, news media and even corporate advertising. Our analysis of the ‘Jesus phone’ clarifies how different groups may appropriate the language and imagery of another to communicate very different meanings and intentions. Intertextuality serves as a framework to unpack the deployment of religion to frame technology and meanings communicated. We also reflect on how religious language may communicate both positive and negative aspects of a technology and instigate an unintentional trajectory in popular discourse as it is employed by different audiences, both online and offline.

Last November a YouTube user, Haemony--or as I learned based on the link she provided Tiffany Christian, who is a graduate student in Oregon--posted a series of videos on "The Practice of Religion in Cyberspace." She described the videos as:

This video log is the culmination of a term-long project for a class of mine at the University of Oregon. My goal with this project was to investigate some of the ways people practice religion (specifically, neo-paganism) in cyberspace in order to assess the "artificiality" of the spirituality.

My opinions here are my own, created by my own research and aided by various published scholars. I do not claim to speak for the entire neo-pagan community. Citations: Berger, Helen A., and Douglas Ezzy. "The Internet as Virtual Spiritual Community: Teen Witches in the United States and Australia." Religion Online: Finding Faith on the Internet. Ed. Lorne L. Dawson and Douglas E. Cowan. New York: Routledge, 2004. 175-88. Print. OLeary, Stephen D. "Cyberspace as Sacred Space: Communicating Religion on Computer Networks." Religion Online: Finding Faith on the Internet. Ed. Lorne L. Dawson and Douglas E. Cowan. New York: Routledge, 2004. 37-58. Print.