ABSTRACT
Often when you log onto a video game you are assigned a quest, challenge, or puzzle that you must solve. Religious studies has been given a similar quest, because, as Lorne Dawson and Douglas Cowan write, “[t]he Internet is changing the face of religion worldwide” (2004: 1). Yet, while digital media have become one of the most important ways in which people practice their faith, because of religious studies’ preoccupation with scripture and the printed word, the discipline has left communication studies and sociology to do the heavy interpretive lifting (Grieve 2006: 12–16). Fortunately, these fields have made much headway into the subject of digital religion, which, as Heidi Campbell writes, was just a few years ago “an underdeveloped area of inquiry” (2005: 309). Still, while communications and sociology have made progress, they have been hampered because they have not clearly articulated of what digital religion consists (Jansen et al. 2010). In other words, scholars of digital religion still need to investigate exactly what counts as digital religion, and why people practice it.
