Digital Media, Religious Authority, and the Covid-19 Pandemic

In a pandemic that isolates people from each other and their religious communities, digital media has made it possible to gather in ways that approximate face-to-face interactions. Zoom funerals, holiday celebrations, and worship are all par for the course these days. Yet there are all kinds of material properties and affordances that make every communication channel distinctive, and we do not know yet if or how digital practices during the pandemic will affect religious life in the long term. Ethnographers, even restricted as we are now from in-person research, are particularly well suited to studying how religious worlds lived on digital media might be changing in unexpected ways.