Religion 2Go! Sperimentare la realtà virutale nella super-diversità

Beginning in the 1960s, social scientists highlighted the progressive integration of new technological means into religious practices of diverse faith communities. The structure of today’s religious practices in Western cities is represented as a network of non-geographically collocated individuals, connected through different technological means and digital applications, integrating with the traditional places of worship and objects. This paper is the outcome of an interdisciplinary research merging social analysis and innovative technology trials, to observe virtualization processes among religious communities. The purpose was to investigate how virtualization technologies could change the way believers connect to one another and to their faiths, how they might evolve their religious practices, how technology might forge new connections between believers and religious objects, how virtualization might help to redefine beliefs and help to maintain or re-create communities of faith in a super-diverse society.