Digital Afterlife and the Spiritual Realm

Few religious leaders have examined the potential for the positive impact of digital media and digital immortality creation in religious contexts. It is evident that there have been recent moves away from traditional funeral services focusing on the transition of the deceased into the future world beyond, towards a rise of memorial content within funerals and commemorative events. This has heralded shifts in afterlife beliefs by replacing them, to all intents and purposes, by attitudes to this life.

Digital Afterlife and the Spiritual Realm explores the ways in which digital media and digital afterlife creation affects social and religious understandings of death and the afterlife.

Key Features:

• Understands the impact of digital media on those living and those working with the bereaved.
• Explores the impact of digital memorialisation post death.
• Examines ways in which digital media may be changing conceptions and theologies of death.

For many people digital afterlife and the spiritual realm largely remains an area that is both inchoate and confusing. This book will begin to unravel some of this bafflement.

Maggi Savin-Baden is Professor of Education at the University of Worcester and has researched and evaluated staff and student experience of learning for over 20 years and gained funding in this area (Leverhulme Trust, JISC, Higher Education Academy, MoD). She has a strong publication record of over 50 research publications and 17 books which reflect her research interests on the impact of innovative learning, digital fluency, cyber-influence, pedagogical agents, qualitative research methods, and problem-based learning. In her spare time, she runs, bakes, climbs and attempts triathlons.