This panel examines how ritualized practices shaped people’s participation in dispersed, albeit networked religious communities. The papers show ritualized engagement with various forms of media shape people’s identities in relation to non-localized communities of practice. This first paper analyzes how Irish Bahá’ís’ various forms of online engagement in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic have transformed community relations, fostering both unity and new tensions between local and transnational networks. Based on the personal narratives of Canadian Muslims, the second paper examines how ritualized practices of Qur’anic memorization transform their understandings of themselves and their communities. The final paper examines how online videos promising to teach people how to master telekinesis as a practical skill are discursively structured with the aim of initiating people into a particular kind of "spiritual awakening". Collectively, the papers offer insight into how dispersed religious communities take shape and create meaning for their members.
The study of sacred space has traditionally centered on fixed, physical locations integral to religious experience. However, decentralized religious movements like the Bahá’í Faith—lacking clergy and permanent places of worship—challenge conventional models of sacredness and community formation. While digital religion scholarship has explored how hierarchical traditions adapt to online spaces, it has not sufficiently examined how decentralized faiths construct sacredness in deterritorialized, networked environments. This study employs multi-sited digital ethnography to analyze how Bahá’ís in Ireland engage with transnational digital networks to sustain religious identity, communal belonging, and governance. Through virtual study circles, devotional meetings, feasts, and interfaith dialogues, digital platforms constitute sacred space rather than merely extending religious practice. The shift to online participation alters community relations by increasing accessibility and global engagement, but it also generates tensions between local and transnational religious networks
The memorization of the Qur'an is a practice as old as revelation. Its completion to memory is considered a communal obligation, is the accomplishment of millions of Muslims around the world and is the aspiration of millions more. This paper argues through the narrativized testimonies of Qur'an memorizers in Canada that memorization is not simply committing the verses of the Qur'an to memory. Rather, it is a highly ritualized, relational language performance-practice immersed in transnationality and global networks, the learning of which is internalized to transform understandings of self, community and futurity.
The Trebor Seven YouTube website is the longest-running site teaching telekinesis on the Internet. It’s creator, Robert Allen, not only demonstrates his abilities through hundreds of “TK moves” but he also aims to teach telekinesis through his channel and other websites. As students begin their exercises to unlock their own abilities, hoping to join the ranks of the virtual Jedi, they are introduced to a religious perspective which is a precursor to success at telekinesis. In this paper, the author will adopt the phenomenological approach and take the role of the new student, reporting on the process of learning telekinesis through “being-in-the-world”, embodiment, and radical Otherness from Robert over a period of three months. Combined with interviews of Robert and his students, this paper will examine YouTube as a meeting point of community, spirituality, initiation, and educational empowerment, particularly for sites which claim to teach psi abilities.