Negotiating Religious Visibility in Digital Media

Negotiating visibility is an active movement towards legitimization. And religions are not exempt from legitimization if they are to endure in these new digital times where competidors battle to fill the intersection between the sacred and the secular. The initial discomfort among the religious with digital challenges dissipated rapidly when they understood two essential aspects of the new scenario. One was that their people (the faithful) filled the virtual space in imaginative and very creative ways. Religious leaders discovered that their faithful were perhaps not present at their mosques, synagogues, temples or churches, but they surely were on Internet 24/7. And they were there, engaging, praying, searching for information, sharing thoughts, pictures, ideas... Focusing on this intuition of communities and visibility of religion, this volume offers the work of scholars, Technology experts, sociologists of religion, journalists, historians and theologians.