Abstract

This chapter discusses how the particularities of religious heritages, especially their understandings of the opportunities offered and constraints imposed by the Internet, matter in the new medium's religious appropriation. Catholic web designers face the dilemma of either creating the room for dialogue, debate, and diversity invited by the medium or following Roman orthodoxy. Their Protestant counterparts find themselves caught between their predominantly text-centered legacy and the visual opportunities of web design, a problem further aggravated by the sensitivities of and contestations among competing Dutch Protestant churches. Those active in the institutionally fragmented field of holistic spirituality, finally, experience neither of these problems and appropriate the Internet as their allegedly "natural" habitat for spiritual sharing and connecting.

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