Digital Gods Digital Religions

Entering Sacred Digital Space: Seeking to Distinguish the Dreamer and the Dream

February 6, 2009

By Richard Thieme Defining the Challenge: The ‘Study’ of ‘Sacred Texts’ in the Digital Era The single quotation marks around ‘study’ and ‘sacred texts’ signify that the words inside them no longer mean what they used to mean. The symbols and images of religious experience are no longer fixed in print but are now flowing. [...]

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The Spiritual Journey

October 6, 2008

by Richard Thieme October 6, 2008 A young man experienced an altered state and emailed to ask about its relationship to orthodox modes of spirituality and religious experience. I thought it might be of value to others who are asking the same question to share my response. I replied: I have used all sorts of [...]

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The Face We See In The Digital Mirror

February 11, 2005

By Richard Thieme National Catholic Reporter, February 11, 2005 I am a middle-age man who grew to maturity in a world of text, immersed in a typographic sea. I read endlessly and began writing stories as a teen. When I tried to find a market for those stories, I turned to a standard reference, Writer’s [...]

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Finding the Answer Within

December 19, 2003

By Richard Thieme William Gibson’s Neuromancer is known to many because of one word, “cyberspace,” a fulcrum of a word around which a whole new world has coalesced. Equally memorable, though, is an image of the cyberjunkie Case jacking into the Dixie Flatline for the first time. The Flatline, a.k.a. McCoy Pauley, is a firmware [...]

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The Episcopalians? They are us – as edited by the NCR

December 15, 2003

The Episcopalians? They are us Assessing the ordination of Gene Robinson and responses to it By RICHARD THIEME Just as California is often said to be the leading edge of American popular culture so that what shows up there will soon show up in Pittsburgh, the Episcopal church often serves as a bellwether for Catholic [...]

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Episcopalians-R-Us: Part Two

November 26, 2003

(published in the National Catholic Reporter) So far the discussion has proceeded as if we all know what homosexuals are and why homosexuality causes distress for some in the church. We uncritically accept the categories of thinking given by our cultures and however much we want to believe that our theological statements transcend our cultures, [...]

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Episcopalians-R-Us

November 25, 2003

(published in the National Catholic Reporter) Just as California is often said to be the leading edge of American popular culture so that what shows up there will soon show up in Pittsburgh, the Episcopal Church often serves as a bellwether for Catholic and Protestant Churches as to what to expect in coming years. Not [...]

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Virtual Souls, Virtual Wine – on religion and technology for the NCR

September 24, 2003

Virtual Souls, Virtual Wine by Richard Thieme published in the National Catholic Reporter When we find ourselves blessed or cursed to live in a period of a genuine transformation – not just a time of accelerated change, but a time of elemental restructuring – it is hard to speak about the implications of that restructuring [...]

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Digital Mystics

September 20, 2000

Mystics are mostly born, I think, not made, so the ability to see the unity of all things must be a function of our genes. Once we can engineer offspring so they have the gifts we choose, it will be interesting to see how many mystics we think we need. If we have too many, [...]

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The Face of Evil

September 6, 2000

Sometimes the streams of our lives converge in a single river and its power is impossible to resist. This month many of the passions which have animated much of my adult life converged. As the recipient of the Gamalial Chair in Peace and Justice through the Lutheran ministry at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, [...]

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Sex Religion and Cyberspace

April 30, 1999

There aren’t many safe bets in the world, but here’s one: things are often the opposite of what they seem. Religion and sex, for example. Carl Jung noted that when people talk about religion, they are often talking about sexuality, and when people talk about sexuality they are often talking about religious and spiritual realities. [...]

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What Works

February 6, 1999

I was reminded this week of the time a Zen monk greeted an audience with a bow. After we returned his bow, he asked, “Do you know why we bow here at the monastery?” All sorts of answers came back at him, most true enough, but none of them on the mark. Some thought we [...]

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Necessary Fictions

May 30, 1998

Many religious and philosophical traditions assert that the “self” as a thing separate from everything else is an illusion. The Buddhist doctrine of no-mind, derived from the experience of enlightenment, is a way of saying that when the floodgates of perception are opened, the illusion of a separate self vanishes. When we have that experience, [...]

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Computer Power and the Power of God

January 18, 1998

originally published in The Christian Century Computer Power and the Power of God by Richard Thieme Four years ago, I wrote an essay on computer applications for spirituality. As I discussed specific applications, I realized that something more essential than the generation of new forms for traditional contents was taking place, namely, the transformation of [...]

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Digital Religion

December 1, 1997

If we take a step back from our own religious beliefs and observe them for a moment, we can see that they show up in our minds and imaginations as images and symbols. It follows that the technologies that manipulate and generate those symbols have a profound impact on the content of our religious lives. [...]

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A Digital Fable

November 14, 1997

A sacred canopy of shared belief used to soar above our heads like a large umbrella, keeping us warm and dry as the contradictory data of real life beat down. A canopy doesn’t have to be sacred — any canopy will do — but because our understanding of the cosmos and our place in it [...]

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The Day the Computer Prayed

October 24, 1997

When a computer prays, is it really prayer? And I mean real prayer, I don’t mean some mood-altering self-manipulation. I mean, is there an intentional focus of energy and intelligence, the intelligence of the heart, so that something happens beyond the merely subjective, something that percolates powerfully through all the levels of our consciousness? Nor [...]

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Beyond the Edge

August 29, 1997

There comes a point in our deepest thinking at which the framework of our thinking itself begins to wrinkle and slide into the dark. We see the edge of our thinking mind, an edge beyond which we can see … something else … a self-luminous “space” that constitutes the context of our thinking and our [...]

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Contact

August 20, 1997

Some people don’t like the scene in the movie “Contact” in which Jodie Foster as a SETI scientist meets the aliens because we aren’t shown what the aliens look like. I think that was the right way to do it. We can’t think the unthinkable; from inside the old paradigm, we can’t imagine what the [...]

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Find the Answer Within

August 5, 1997

Find the Answer Within published in .net Magazine (UK)Summer 1997 William Gibson’s Neuromancer is known to many because of one word, “cyberspace,” a fulcrum of a word around which a whole new world has coalesced. Equally memorable, though, is an image of the cyberjunkie Case jacking into the Dixie Flatline for the first time. The [...]

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A Silent Retreat

June 27, 1997

The mind is like a chattering monkey, some Buddhists say, and one goal of disciplined spirituality — i.e. doing “what works” — is to quiet that mind. Spiritual tools are practices validated by generations of trial-and-error that more or less work, that allow the “ambient noise” of our lives to diminish and finally — in [...]

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The Spirit of Success

May 2, 1997

The Spirit of Success Books on spirituality and business are flooding the marketplace. Why? The boomers, the biggest market in history, are in midlife. They’re asking hard questions and looking for answers. Their questions — how do my values relate to making a living? How can I balance life’s practical demands with the urgency of [...]

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The Interior Castle

April 19, 1997

The Interior Castle The spatial metaphor of architecture has deep implications. A house, for example, is an archetypal symbol for the psyche; when we dream of houses, we are dreaming of our interior “space.” Teresa of Avila’s The Interior Castle described spiritual development as analogous to the exploration of hidden rooms. Similarly, orators in ancient [...]

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The Sacred Groves of Cyberspace

July 18, 1995

The Sacred Groves of Cyberspace by Richard Thieme published in .net Magazine in the UK in 1995 Religion in cyberspace? Absolutely. Traditional religious groups are rushing onto the WWW as fast as they can make a home page. But it goes beyond that: For some, cyberspace itself is a religious experience. Let’s define “religious experience” [...]

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In Search of the Grail

May 18, 1995

In Search of the Grail Originally published in Wired For Moses, it was a burning bush. For Buddha, it happened under the bo tree. For me, it was playing a game of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with my son. As we threaded our way past babel fish and Vogon poetry readings, I discovered that [...]

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The Stock Market, UFOs and Religious Experience

May 23, 1994

The Stock Market, UFOs and Religious Experience reflections on a speech I have given for investment analysts,  religious seekers, and other interested parties … As a consultant and public speaker, I address a variety of issues: leadership, the uses of power, and the transformations of organization; diversity, conflict reduction, and team-building; and ethics. But I [...]

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Computer Applications for Spirituality

February 8, 1993

By Richard Thieme This formal theological essay was originally written in 1988. It was quite dated when published by the Anglican Theological Review in 1993. The transition from a culture created by the technology of print to one created by electronic processing of information is an occasion of excitement and great opportunity as well as [...]

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