This article provides a preliminary report of a study of religious-oriented internet memes and seeks to identify the common communication styles, interpretive practices and messages about religion communicated in this digital medium. These findings argue that memes provide an important sphere for investigating and understanding religious meaning-making online, which expresses key attributes of participatory culture and trends towards lived religion.

Religion has the power to shape our understanding of gender and sexuality through various forms of practice, discourse, authority, and regulation. As religion is increasingly experienced through digital media, we can postulate on how the use of digital media might impact religious conceptions of gender and sexuality. This research offers a first step in that direction. More specifically, I examine Jewish Question and Answer (Q&A) websites to illuminate how this medium informs and regulates understandings and practices of gender and sexuality. This study illuminates how religious (self-)regulation is happening online, through the practice of asking and cultural and technological affordances that invite users to “confess” their sexual transgressions. I suggest the term “technological incitement to confess” as a way of thinking about how digital media might shape the religious practice of Q&As. That is, offering a Foucauldian analysis, I suggest online Jewish religious Q&A websites operate as digital panopticon, where the practice of asking becomes a tool for self-regulation. Although new to the online sphere, the practice of Q&As has a long tradition in Judaism, known as Responsa. Traditional Responsa is understood as a legal document, but when this practice takes place online, I argue that, at least relative to topics of sexuality and gender, users themselves are not looking for a legal consultation, but rather seeking a space to confess their sins. What was once a legal, public matter becomes via new media a form of personal self-regulation.

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This article explores the relationship between communication technology and religion. While previous research has focused on how religious institutions and individuals use digital media, this article emphasizes the religious feelings digital media seem to invoke, with examples like the Jesus Phone or Kopimism. This is explained using theories from Religious Studies. Borrowing from Durkheim, digital media are examined as “sacred” and as “profane”. It is suggested that digital media can be both sacred and profane because hypermodern societies have sanctified the profane. More specifically, hypermodern societies have “killed” god and replaced it with the human, with everybody. It is then digital media—a tool that is meant to be owned by everybody and represent everybody—that take the place of the divine. This tool then, because it connects and communicates human needs and everyday thoughts (and not despite that), inspires feelings of awe and sanctity, even as we use it for the most profane activities.

This study explores how Israeli Jewish rabbis negotiate their authority through the practice of online Responsa, a Jewish tradition of rabbinical questions and answers (Q&A). A total of n = 567 Q&A were collected from five different rabbis answering on Kipa.co.il. By analyzing questions asked by anonymous users and answered by specific rabbis, this research shows how online Responsa allows rabbis to negotiate their rabbinical authority. We highlight two trends regarding rabbinical authority: (a) a growing need for online presence, meaning that the quantity of answers becomes an important part of constructing rabbinical authority online and (b) online activity in rabbinical Q&A changes the length and textual depth of the answers. The online Jewish Responsa is more concise and tends not to supply textual support. These trends, we argue, result in a reframing of the rabbi’s roles, and the Halachic discourse itself.