GIVE ME THAT ONLINE RELIGION
Brenda E. Brasher
Jossey-Bass, 203 pages, $24.95

People who use the Internet quickly find that it makes light of time, space, and the human body. On one level, only the mind—the message—is important. As the famous New Yorker cartoon puts it, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." This is not all bad, but it is a big shift indeed. Brenda Brasher is concerned with religion in this context, and more particularly in the context of cyberspace, the imaginary "place" our minds have built to help us cope with these disembodied conditions.

Brasher's Give Me That Online Religion is the first critical foray into the field of religion in cyberspace, and it bears all the marks of early exploration. Her pioneering contribution is in helping us see the online world as a new context for human activity, one that poses hard questions to traditional religious belief. But because it is a hasty survey of a continent-sized field, it falls short.

Brasher, assistant professor of religion at Mt. Union College in Alliance, Ohio, brackets the truth claims of any given religion. But she also supports sincere religious faith and organized religion because they help people search for meaning, outline ethical boundaries, and counteract individualism.

Every new technology causes cultural shifts. And ever since writing and parchment first transformed oral cultures, technologies have shaped the way humans have expressed their faith. In this guide, Brasher explores how religious faith—formal and informal—is affected by the latest shift caused by the emerging global network of computers that form the Internet.

Religion is alive and well in cyberspace, but it's not the same old religion. The imaginary geography of cyberspace transforms ...