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Abstract:

Bringing together the cognitive, social, and emotional aspects of religious practice in the digital age this chapter presents a theoretical framework for understanding the religion-media interface, along with the role which language and technology play in mediating the spiritual and transforming the notion of sacred space, sacred time and a sense of communion. In our Media Proximization Approach, we argue that technology allows seekers of such communion and spiritual experience to satisfy the compulsion of proximity with both the sacred and other believers/worshippers, enabling proximization on a vertical and horizontal level respectively. In the centre of this mechanism – cognitive in nature and necessarily social in its implications – we place techno-discursive manipulations of several dimensions of distance, viz. spatial, temporal, epistemic, axiological, and emotional ones, contingent on the performative potential of language and technological affordances of various media, which make it possible to “transport” believers into “worship spaces” of all kinds and offer them a sense of communal experience.

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Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion

Dacher Keltner, Jonathan Haidt (2003)

In this paper we present a prototype approach to awe. We suggest that two appraisals are central and are present in all clear cases of awe: perceived vastness, and a need for accommodation, defined as an inability to assimilate an experience into current mental structures. Five additional appraisals account for variation in the hedonic tone of awe experiences: threat, beauty, exceptional ability, virtue, and the supernatural. We derive this perspective from a review of what has been written about awe in religion, philosophy, sociology, and psychology, and then we apply this perspective to an analysis of awe and related states such as admiration, elevation, and the epiphanic experience.