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Naive personalism as a product of the "living" text  

Christianity is mainly a text-concentration religion. A text in Christianity isn’t reduced to representation of religious experience, but a text itself is an important part of this experience. That’s why the change of text forms may cause the change of Christian religion’s content. A new form of text arose at the Internet. We call its “living” text conditionally. This text has these peculiarities: the polycentrism of its formation, permanent growth in different directions and the modules-cells structure. Possibly, the intensification of personalism in Christian consciousness is the result of spontaneity’s situation, which is formed in the sphere of “living” text. This supposition is considered on example of “doctrine Only Love”, which arose at Andrey Kuraev’s forum.

Internet blog as a new method of preaching   

As we live in the age of virtual communication, we have to notice, that the huge part of contemporary confessions turns to “virtualization”. It includes foundation of Internet-placing churches, sites of religious organizations, online conversions (first of all, to Islam) and the innumerous forms of any other religious activity.  One of the most popular kind of nowdays’ communication is a weblog-hosting. So,we concentrated on problem of religion conversations in the Internet. We are to answer the question, can blogging become the instrument of conversion? We took up the weblog hosted by Pentecostal girl aged nineteen. Pentecostals focuses great attention on their missionary work, especially with youngsters. So, we can prove or deny the effect of ‘webloggin’ homily”. We lead the full contact analysis of this source, what means syntactical, semantical and lingvo-analysis, and also researching the phenomenon of diary (classical and weblog) in the modus of preaching.

Religion and Internet: the Mission in the Information-oriented Society  

The article describes the main functions of the Internet in the media practice of religious institutions, the problems that missionaries have to face in the internet communication, factors of the network communications' influence upon the interreligious, interdenominational and denominational relations. Religious sources of the Internet  are viewed in the frame of studies of such scholars as Manuel Castells, Nicholas Karr, David Gordon etc. The report contains preliminary results of the poll conducted among Russian researchers of the religious media communications.

Dr. Israel Campos Méndez

Neo-Mithraic communities in Internet  

This paper intends to analyse a novel religious reality which has found on Internet a fecund soil for its diffusion and consolidation: the rebirth of neo-Mithraic communities in distant places around the world. We will organize our research in two steps. First, we will begin by identifying the ultimate motivations behind the origin of these cyber-groups and their exact relationship with the recovery and reformulation of the cult of Mithra, whose zenith was achieved during the Roman Empire. Then, we will review the elements defining the organisation and the religious practice of these neo-Mithraic communities nowadays, and discuss the role played by Internet in the development of all these functions.

Florence Pasche

Some methodological reflections about the Study of Religions on the video-sharing websites (VSW)  

This paper deals with the study of religions and the Internet in a very specific case: the video sharing websites such as YouTube or GoogleVideos. “Religious” video sharing websites also are of interest for the historians of religions. The aim of this paper is to survey methodological issues that arise in the study of religions on the video sharing websites (language, pseudonyms, position of the researcher as an observer, ever increasing data, etc.). I also give an experimental typology of the representations of religions on the video sharing websites and discuss some possible interpretations of this phenomenon. The use of this particular type of material in the teaching of the academic study of religions is also discussed.

Internet sources on Russian Old Believers