ABSTRACT
We are immersed today in what Wade Clark Roof calls “a time of paradigm shifts,” a disruption between experiential and “institutionalized” forms of religion (2001: 171, 173). Contemporary “spiritual searching,” according to Roof, “is largely a private matter involving loosely based social networks and small groups” (p. 177). Today’s religiously minded person is a “bricoleur,” one involved in building with whatever is at hand from a variety of sources, who “cobble[s] together a religious world from available images, symbols, moral codes, and doctrines,” all the while “exercising considerable agency in defining and shaping what is considered to be religiously meaningful” (p. 75). In this case study, we look at mobile device applications (or apps) in order to consider how our prolific use of religious apps defines how we see ourselves even as it also reveals new challenges to traditional religion and authority. As our use of religious apps places control of religious interpretation and ritual performance increasingly in the hands of individuals, it also suggests a fluidity, hybridity, bricolage, and flow that gesture against traditional notions of fixed religious authority. The questions raised about authenticity by our use of religious apps also gesture toward a renewed sense of ownership and awareness of who we are and what we choose to believe, and thus presage a new kind of individualized, personalized authenticity of religious experience.
