Religion and Technology in the Digital Age

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to invite you to contribute to a Special Issue of Religions addressing the issue of Religion and Technology in the Digital Age. We live in a world where a robot priest can livestream your funeral, and where fictional cyborgs ponder why they cannot go to heaven when they die. It is a world where 60% of the global population is connected by the internet, and where technology has affected nearly every aspect of what it means to be human. For this Special Issue, we invite interdisciplinary discussions of religion and technology around two broad themes: 1) the use or lack of use of technology in religious thought and/or practice and 2) the line between human and non-human in regards to religious practices (practices performed by or for robots) and religious questions raised by or because of robots.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Religion and (lack of) technology (fiction). Religion is often represented as a violent force, especially in relation to the technology that it uses (such as in the use of the cutting tool by the Magisterium in the series His Dark Materials) or, more commonly, to the technology it lacks. This second theme finds representation in such diverse places as among the idyllic but deadly folk of Midsommar (Aster 2019), in the cannibalistic religious sect in The Last of Us (2023), in the dystopian and infertile world of The Handmaid’s Tale (2017), and in the religious taboos of the Appalachian cult depicted in Wrong Turn (Nelson 2021). What do fictional horrors like these tells us about the relationship between religion, technology, and what it means to be human?
• Religion and technology (non-fiction). The HBO domumentary Love Has Won: The Cult of the Mother God (Olsen, 2023) details how the cult used YouTube to upload their first videos and spread their ideas. How do religious practitioners and documentarians of religions use technology in their representations of self and the other?
• Artificial intelligences or robots and religion. From the real world of Buddhist robot monks to the Bless2-U robot pastor of Germany, to the funerals of robot dogs in Japan, there are many examples of the role that AI plays in the relationship between humans and religion. In the world of science fiction, stories such as Bladerunner 2049 (Villenue 2019) and The Creator (Edwards, 2023) question the boundaries of what is human, as cyborgs wrestle with the lack of a soul and humans attend funerals for their AI What do these trends, real and/or fictional, tell us about religion, technology, and what it means to be human?   

Dr. Melissa Conroy
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• technology
• dystopia
• artificial intelligence
• robot
• cyborg
• religion and film
• religion and television
• religious documentaries