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Cyberhenge: Magic, Metatechnology, and the Neopagan Internet

Forthcoming from Routledge in 2004

For the most part, religion on the Internet is little more than a cyber-shadow, an electronic reflection of real life devotion. For growing numbers of Neopagans, however—Wiccans and other witches, Druids, Goddess-worshippers, and ceremonial magicians—the Internet provides an environment alive with possibilities for invention, innovation, and experimentation. In this book I examine the variety of ways in which Neopagans are not only using the Net to provide information about their tradition(s), but also how it is used as a vehicle to develop and expand the frontiers of Neopagan religious experience.

From online Sabbat rituals to an algorithmic I Ching for which one pays with electronically banked “Karma Coins™,” from e-covens and cyber-groves where neophytes can learn everything from the Wiccan Rede to spellworking, and from arguments over the validity of online ritual to the authenticity of one’s magickal lineage, Neopaganism on the Internet is an ongoing experiment in the creation and recreation of postmodern religious traditions.

Religion Online: Finding Faith on the Internet
(edited with Lorne L. Dawson)

Forhcoming from Routledge in 2004

Building on the scholarly work begun in Religion on the Internet: Research Prospects and Promises (Hadden and Cowan 2000), Religion Online provides an introduction to the study of this burgeoning new religious reality specifically geared towards the undergraduate reader. Religion on the Internet gathered together the first research investigating aspects of the presence of religion online, and Religion Online continues the investigation.

Some of the questions our authors consider are: Why do particular manifestations of religious belief and practice flourish in cyberspace, and not others? What are the possible consequences for practitioners of these developments? How does participation in religion online impact people’s sense of identity, and community? Are online religious communities really possible? How do the religious orientations that flourish online differ from their real life counterparts, and what is it about the virtual environment that has caused or encouraged them to change? What, if anything, does cyberspace offer both the religious practitioner and the religious provider that real life does not?

These questions will be explored in essays that provide a window of insight into a number of instances of religious practice online.

Click here to read a draft version of my chapter, "Contested Spaces: Movement, Countermovement, and E-Space Propaganda."

The Remnant Spirit: Conservative Reform in Mainline Protestantism

Praeger Publishers, 2003 (in press)

In October 2003, Praeger will be publishing The Remnant Spirit: Conservative Reform in Mainline Protestantism, which discusses the spectrum of reform, renewal, and reactionary movements within North American mainline Protestantism. Click here to read the first two pages, or click here for ordering information from Greenwood/Praeger.

Bearing False Witness? An Introduction to the Christian Countercult

Praeger Publishers, 2003

Bearing False Witness? An Introduction to the Christian Countercult has just been released by Praeger Publishers. This is the first book-length consideration of the evangelical countercult movement in North America. Click here to read the first two pages, or click here for ordering information from Greenwood/Praeger. If you would like to read other essays or conference papers on aspects of the Christian countercult, click here.

Religion on the Internet: Research Prospects and Promises (edited with Jeffrey K. Hadden)

JAI Press/Elsevier Science, 2000

Released in January 2001, Religion on the Internet is the first edited collection of scholarly articles to consider the burgeoning phenomenon of cyberspace religiosity.

Click here for the Table of Contents, or click here for JAI/Elsevier.

Click here to read the first review of Religion on the Internet: "Anticult terrorism via the Internet revisited": "The book is highly recommended to scholars of religion and the Internet in general, and in particular to scholars of new religious movements."

Religion on the Internet has also been reviewed in the Journal of Contemporary Religion 17 (3): 383-84 and Sociology of Religion 63 (4): 540-41.

Bearing False Witness? An Introduction to the Christian Countercult (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2003).