Religion and the COVID-19 pandemic: mediating presence and distance

ABSTRACT

This introduction opens a collection of seven articles which investigate how religious communities negotiate demands for physical distance induced by governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in accord with their religious and spiritual aspirations to establish presence and togetherness. Grounded in ethnography and media analysis, our contributors offer studies on Pentecostal healing, Mormon eschatology, Hindu diasporic rituals, Chinese spirit mediums, the virtual Burning Man festival, Sufi sonic meditations, and televised Shia Muslim mourning. These studies collectively demonstrate that in pandemic rituals (1) Media are reflexive and enchanted; (2) The religious sensorium is sticky and lingers in embodied and mnemonic ways even under new circumstances of mediation; (3) Space and time emerge as modular, transposable, condensed, yet expanding. Ritual innovations can provoke new kinds of mediations, sensory engagements, and temporal-spatial arrangements, while revealing continuities with pre-pandemic cosmologies, theologies, liturgies, and social hierarchies, and relying on memories of previous ritual sensory experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19 pandemic
• mediation
• religion and media
• religion and senses
• pandemic ritual
• ritual temporality
• sacred space
• innovative religiosities

Introduction

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, various wide-reaching regulations were implemented to mitigate the virality of disaster throughout the world. The articles in this collection examine how COVID era regulations, and anxieties of infection, have intervened in religious lives and practices. For those who hold religious or spiritual commitments, a fulfilling experience requires, at bottom, the sense and sensations of connection, communion, and presence. In these pandemic times, how have ritual actions, events and performances been (re)mediated to allow religious devotees to navigate the complex balance between ‘presence’ (Engelke 2007) and cautious ‘distance’? How did established patterns of religious participation, including ‘sensational forms’ (Meyer 2009), emerge as reproduced, (dis)embodied or re-invented? In what ways did the translocation of devotees out of shared space onto remote media platforms generate and reframe religious experience?

This thematic issue investigates how new demands for distance are negotiated in accord with communities’ aspirations to establish connection, proximity, and togetherness to realize their religious and spiritual goals. In any ritual community there is a ‘gap’, or distance, between the devotee, and the religious, spiritual or transcendent goal, as amply demonstrated through scholarship on ‘religion and the media turn’ (Engelke 2010; Meyer 2011; Eisenlohr 2011). Observing the liturgical action at any mosque, church, temple or altar brings to mind how practitioners strive to bridge external realities and inner states of heart and mind, and between spiritual aspirations and phenomenological experiences of worship. A range of techniques – prayer, chanting, intervening spirits, and ritual implements like sacred books, relics, prayer beads, musical instruments, audio-visual technologies – allow practitioners to achieve presence – the presence of the divine, or co-presence with other community members which renders rituals effective. Indeed, technologies – including ‘technologies of the self’ – mediate and bridge the chasm, producing connectivity through ritual gestures, and cultivated inner dispositions (Foucault 1988; Hirschkind 2006). In the Covidian age, the separatory requirements of social and physical distance almost inevitably compound the ontological distance between divinity and devotee.

Mobilizing various aesthetic, material, and psycho-physiological techniques, religious and non-religious spiritual communities mediate ontological and physical divides and achieve a sense of presence in vertical and horizontal ways. The vertical aspect aspires to the presence of deities, spirits, energies, and ancestors, whether thought of as immanent or transcendent; the horizontal one concerns the presence of fellow practitioners, companions, seekers, and worshipers. Such compresence establishes social cohesion and a sense of belonging while providing the basis for the performance of efficacious rituals and the experience of extraordinary states. We focus on the negotiations of presence and distance as religious and spiritual communities are constrained by regulations that might be incompatible with existing liturgies and cosmologies, while they forge new networks in a ‘sanitized sacred’ realm (Lorea et al. forthcoming).

Religion in the Covidian age has been treated as a ‘high touch’ surface, like elevator buttons and door knobs: a social vessel highly exposed to virality that needs to be carefully sanitized through specific regulations. Recommendations to sanitize hands and high-touch surfaces emerged in parallel with mandates of vacating, cleaning and disinfecting devotional spaces. Ritual practitioners have been required to revolutionize their embodied participation, bringing their own prayer mat to the mosque, using disposable q-tips to apply holy water in the church, abstaining from singing hymns, or having their temperature taken while undergoing spirit possession (Chang and Lim 2020). With traditional sacred spaces being emptied, reconfigured online or in backyards and balconies, sterilized from sacred sound and cleansed of the residues of breath and haptic contact, instances of the sanitized sacred cut across new pandemic modalities of mediation which utilize technology, space and the body sensorium in creative and yet coherent ways. In the process, ‘sanitization itself emerges not quite as a neutral procedure endowed with scientific universality, but rather as a culturally inflected and governmentally informed practice that applies to different social surfaces in unequal ways’ (Lorea et al. forthcoming).

Representations of religion during the Covid pandemic have been overwhelmingly preoccupied with the inherent health risks associated with religious congregations (Atique and Itumalla 2020; Quadri 2020). In secularist critiques, faith appears in opposition to ‘common sense’ (Kapila 2020). Proximity and the porous exchanges between bodies of ritual participants – the opposite of ‘social distancing’‒are represented as dangerously crossing the line that generates social relationships of contagion and infection. In some contexts, Covidian age regulations have sparked off profound disputes over compliance to social distancing, and other measures to preserve human lives. As Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (2020) demonstrates in the context of the US, these tensions extend and deepen pre-existing contentions between conservatives and liberals over the politics of religious freedom. In other national contexts however, religious institutions and individuals have been markedly more compliant amid the intensification of biopolitical urgency. In Singapore, where the guest editors were based at the outset of the pandemic, compliance during the ‘circuit breaker’ period (the state’s euphemism to avoid the term ‘lockdown’) was especially high, stemming from cultural factors that are tightly connected to the state’s established imperatives to maintain social order and religious harmony. Taking into account an array of contexts that have impelled or mandated distancing among religious practitioners in differing degrees, this thematic issue underscores the innovative remediations and the ‘ad hoc, alternative liturgical celebrations’ (Sheklian 2020) through which institutions, devotional communities, festival organizers, and individuals, have strived to create fulfilling religious expressions and experiences. Embedded in the geopolitical, national, communal and sectarian contexts of compliance and non-compliance, the papers in this collection attend to the creative albeit constrained ways in which people have sought to achieve presence, communion, and community, in accordance with underlying cosmologies. We query the temporal vicissitudes of circuit-breaking and circuit-mending practices entailed by regulating the socialities of religious communion.

This thematic issue brings together interdisciplinary perspectives in religious studies, anthropology, sociology, performance studies, communication and media studies, and ethnomusicology, to examine how the matter of achieving presence and ritual efficacy on the one hand, and anxieties to maintain social and physical distance on the other, are negotiated. Grounded in diverse forms of ethnography apt to the current conditions, including remote yet immersively participatory digital ethnography of religious events, as well as media and social media analysis, our contributors offer studies on Pentecostal healing, Hindu diasporic rituals, Chinese spirit mediumship, the virtual Burning Man festival, Sufi sonic meditations, Shia Muslim televised mourning, and Mormon eschatology in this Covidian age.

Building upon the discussions held over a two-week online workshop,¹ our thematic issue explores how pandemic religious modalities of practice, healing, and worship mediate presence and distance by creatively engaging new technologies, sacred spaces, and techniques of the body sensorium. This sacred creativity (Palmisano and Pannofino 2017) does not happen in a vacuum of feeling and power relationships, but rather is profoundly and consciously embedded in the troubled times of a multidimensional global crisis. Hence the authors featured in this issue not only discuss how religious communities reimagined networking and place-making in critical times, but also how practitioners experienced a sense of loss of community, separation from sources of religious authority or authenticity, estrangement, and apocalyptic anxieties.

Rejecting the assumption that rituals are intrinsically static, rigid or conservative, and holding in view that spiritual and religious groups have always been agentive in navigating opportunities and constraints in new circumstances (Allocco and Pennington 2019), we explore religious responses to COVID-19 and ritual innovations along the dimensions of 1. Media; 2. Senses; and 3. Time-space. We keep these dimensions separate for the sake of analysis but while each theme produces specific sets of questions, they also overlap and should be considered as inextricably interconnected.

1. Media: New and old technologies mediate the ontological and physical gaps between human and divine, and between individual participants, enabling communions of various sorts. Articles in this thematic issue explore how new mediations and patterns of technology usage enable ritual efficacy and social connection in a sanitized sacred space which strives to maintain social distance. Several of the articles are valuable for theorizing how pandemic forms of religiosity contribute to understanding new media more broadly. They engage in discussions of reflexivity, receptivity, and enchantment of media and technology.

2. Senses: The body, with the potential to be rendered vulnerable to, and even to become a conduit for the virus, is at the same time physically engaged in apotropaic postures and ritual actions to fend off the virus. Several of the articles interrogate how the use of new media alters body-mind techniques of worship. Authors describe a concern for maintaining fidelity to pre-pandemic ritual forms, especially through the practitioners’ reliance upon memory of in-person events and gatherings; but they also analyze the introduction of potentially subversive innovations that might transgress normative hierarchies and values. The articles demonstrate what we term the ‘stickiness’ of the religious sensorium, or the desire by religious practitioners to stick to pre-pandemic religious formats of sensory engagement to achieve an optimal sense of religious presence. While the mediation might be reshaped and the ‘place’ might have shifted, online or elsewhere, the way of engaging the senses in ritual participation is ‘sticky’, and inextricably tied to ritual efficacy and the fulfillment of ritual and social obligations.

3. Space-time: Virtually all of the articles in this collection detail the plural ways in which religious practitioners participate in reconfiguring the temporalities and spatialities of the sacred (see also Walton and Mahadev 2019). Pandemic regulations demanded that religious institutions and individuals altered their missions and transposed their worship to private, domestic, or online space. To what extent are sacred spaces ‘modular’ forms that can be transposed to new environments? New spatial regulations and reconfigurations may be conceived as blocking the flow of contagion, sanitizing the ‘place’ of the sacred; yet they may enable or impede a sense of proximity during ritual performance. Facing new kinds of immobility because of the pandemic, religious itinerants – pilgrims, festival visitors, missionaries, migrant and diasporic communities – strove to recreate religious performances, experiencing expansions or contractions in the dimensions of space and time. The articles ask what happens to perceptions of time and space in such alternative attempts to establish divine presence and communal togetherness through synchronous, asynchronous, live-streamed, and virtual rituals.

We will discuss the three themes and how the articles in this collection contribute to these dimensions in more detail in three sections below (‘Pandemic Mediations’; ‘Sticky Sensorium’; ‘Pandemic Sacredness in Space and Time’). In addition, we take seriously the variations in experiencing forms of displacement and diasporic consciousness in the midst of national ‘lockdowns’, ‘circuit-breakers’, and periods of quarantine. As Mellquist Lehto (2020b) and Utsa Mukherjee (2022, this issue) suggest, diaspora provides a lens that can be fruitfully extended to study pandemic forms of religiosity and ritual innovation. In the Covidian age, numerous religious communities became akin to diasporas, scattered and separated from their ‘place’ of gathering. The habitual space of ritual performance, which is now inaccessible, becomes a kind of homeland, a place of belonging to which one aspires to return. The home, on the other hand, becomes the site of displacement that one is forced to inhabit. Many religious participants have experienced, although perhaps in a vicarious and temporary manner, a kind of displacement that produces a diasporic consciousness in Covidian times. What is more, with regard to use of media technology, it is remarkable how diasporic and migrant religious communities pioneered trends and modalities of ritual reconfiguration that have become mainstream during COVID-19. Migrant and diasporic ways of negotiating the presence of sacredness and community while staying at a distance from ‘imaginary homelands’ (Rushdie 1992) have become paradigmatic. Yet, the privilege of connectivity remains unequally distributed among social groups, given how the pandemic has sharply amplified pre-existing social differences, class hierarchies and gender inequalities.

The articles in this collection show that religious and spiritual communities bend ritual conventions, and recreate places to feel proximity and presence while maintaining a safe distance. While doing so, ritual participants act on the basis of pre-existing ‘receptive cosmologies’ (Lorea et al. forthcoming) informing the ways they conceive of life, death, ‘end of times’ and disease.² The employment of new media platforms can reshape, repress, or reproduce traditional sensuous and embodied engagements with the divine, as well as with the other members of a community. While reproducing pre-existing hierarchies and power relationships, at times exacerbating them, the use of digital mediations also creates enhanced opportunities for inclusivity, granting access to ritual spaces to those who could not travel physically, or did not fit morally (Devakishen 2020), in the traditional setting. Virtual mediations, in our contributions, are not merely a poor copy of ‘physical’, ‘in-person’, ‘live’ experience, but rather blurred, blended, ‘phygital’³ and contested arenas to recreate a culturally informed sensory epistemology with the constraints and the possibilities offered by new technologies.

COVID-induced requirements for social distance produced a certain religious use of digital media which might not be ‘spatially intercorporeal’ but functionally so (see Sparey 2022, this issue), in that they create networks and new, gendered publics (see Zakaria 2020b) and counterpublics (see Fader 2020). These digital mediations of religion potentially open up a space for younger audiences (Bhambra and Tiffany 2021) and politically progressive voices (Frederick 2020). For example, online interactive spaces are used creatively by Mormon feminists who would perhaps be hesitant to challenge their religion in ‘real life’ (Finnigan and Ross 2013). The affordances of particular media and the involvement of new religious publics enable these pandemic ritual transformations to be potentially subversive, in respect to the traditional conventions of ritual performances and hierarchies, or to reiterate continuing beliefs and practices. In other words, pandemic ritual arrangements can act by means of mimesis and fidelity, repeating pre-pandemic experiences and approximating in-person rituals, and real-life iterations of the gatherings; but they can also introduce and normalize subversions. As Heidi Campbell (2020a) notes, religiously-inspired digital media experts can challenge established religious leaders and those who seek to maintain institutional structures of authority, in a world where online and offline religious spaces are increasingly blended and intertwined. For example, with prohibitions on gathering in the ‘original’ ritual arena in the homeland, diasporic rituals during the pandemic inverted the usual hierarchy between ‘authentic’ rituals back home versus rituals reproduced in the diaspora. Diasporas can now offer digital ritual platforms that homeland residents resort to and join remotely (Mukherjee 2022) – a trend that may well outlive the epidemiological life course of the Coronavirus.

While a mainstream discourse seems to represent the Coronavirus as an agentive being that causes religion to become less institutional and more individualized (Baker et al. 2020), less sensuous and more digital, and less publicly visible while more private and interiorized (Musa 2020), our thematic issue unsettles and complicates these dichotomies and their teleological presumptions. The contributions here reflect upon anxieties surrounding the use of digital media, isolated bodies, and private spaces, while demonstrating through thick ethnographic detail that these new mediations do not appear in a vacuum of material and affective implications. Otherwise put, religious publicity and outwardness may be stifled, but they do not suddenly become devoid of feeling. Rather, rituals mediated through screens are equally ‘physical’, and ‘real’, even as those shifts to new platforms may reshape the ‘structures of religious feeling’ (Pellegrini 2007).

The contributions in this issue demonstrate that the pandemic has not generated a one-dimensional, once-and-for-all, ‘new normal’. Material practices such as lighting incense in front of the laptop screen, or dismantling the pieces of a hard drive repository which holds animate multimedia offerings so as to simulate the ritual destruction of sacrifice (Pike 2022, this issue), illuminate how the reshaping of mediations do not inherently violate established theological and liturgical concerns. What several of the articles in the collection make clear is that religious practitioners bend and creatively adopt vehicles, technologies, and bureaucracy in ways that demonstrate respect for overarching concerns for purity, efficacy, and the achievement of presence, communion, transcendence, with an eye towards contingent future possibilities.

In sum, the articles of our thematic issue offer the following distinctive contributions: First, they provide new empirical data on religious responses and ritual changes due to COVID-19 through a contextual approach that gives voice to the experiences of specific, situated communities. Second, they foreground new research conducted through pandemic research modalities (Lupton 2020), including remote ethnography and netnography. Third, they take into account the non-linear ways that the global health crisis has unfolded across the globe. The rich ethnographies of this collection document vital aspects of religious change, theological debates, and ritual transformations in relation to media, senses, and spatio-temporality.

Pandemic mediations: media as reflexive and enchanted

While mainstream media represents online religiosity as a novelty, with the implicit assumption that religious leaders and institutions are anachronistic and refractory to change, historical perspectives on religion and media point out that ritual communities have always been transforming and embracing new modalities of communication to access their more-than-human recipients as well as with the other members of their community. The possibilities sparked by vernacular print at once allowed Bible reading and interiorized faith (Weber 1905), and outward forms of religious imagining that have expanded and traveled with colonial conquest, and which processually consolidated the formation of new national communities (Anderson 1983). The evangelical reformers of the sixteenth century declared the invention of printing with a movable type to be an act of God (Engelke 2013). Pentecostal healers were quick to embrace the radio, and later the television, as a direct channel for the Holy Spirit (Blanton 2015). The dramatic expansion of capacity of the Internet in the mid-1990s had a revolutionary impact on all domains of culture, sociality and communication, leading to the creation of religion online and of online religion as forms of lived religion (Helland 2005). While religious engagements with digital technologies are not new, the Covid pandemic has certainly catalyzed and multiplied online rituals, with an acceleration of the processes of digital mediation and an unprecedented reliance upon social media and online networking platforms.

Anxieties surrounding the religious use of digital media in the Covidian age not only come from outsider observers, but are also pronounced among insiders. Most communities expressed preoccupations with the maintenance of traditional hierarchies and authorities once rituals enter the chaotic and unsupervised world of the internet. Religion online can be perceived as running the risk of creating a community of believers ‘without any anchor’ in the physical embodiment of faith (Ward 2006). In a ‘sanitized sacred’ realm of physical separation and digital compresence, ritual specialists and participants experience diverse forms of estrangement, loss, and concerns for ritual efficacy and authenticity. However, digital compresence is far from monolithic and homogeneous. There are significant differences among the various kinds of new media that these communities have adopted – ranging from television, YouTube, Facebook Live, Zoom, sophisticated VR platforms, popular smartphone apps etc. – and all have their different affordances, limitations, privileged publics, and algorithms of access, that have been exploited in order to reproduce presence.

While presence is assumed to be achievable in embodied and emplaced forms, during the pandemic the presence of the deity in/as the spirit medium appears as disembodied, ‘out-of-time’ and ‘out-of-place’: Alvin Lim’s article (2022, this issue) examines live-streamed possession of spirit mediums by Chinese underworld gods in Malaysia, demonstrating how a real-time chat function reveals intimate details of supplicants’ private lives, during consultations with channeled gods. Lim suggests that the technology of live-streaming reshapes ideas of ritual presence and efficacy because it enables spirit possessions to be endlessly re-played. Despite this reiterability, live-streamed and uploaded possessions maintain their traditional goals of providing consultation for the wealth and health of the devotees. While reproducing the conventions of the genre of this ritual performance, live-streamed possessions subvert the canonical boundaries of private and public, by shifting the ritual intervention with the channeled deities from the face-to-face consultation with the medium, to the publicly and openly accessible sphere of digital media.

For Shia Muslims who call into the talk-show #IAMHUSSEINI, private disclosures of hardship enable individualized televisual catharsis and shared ritual mourning in the month of Muharram. This ‘atypical mode of worship’ analyzed in Rhys Sparey’s article (2022, this issue), is sequential and individual: one phone call after the other, each caller left free to stylize their prayer, recitation or lamentation in the way they deem appropriate, ranging from chest-beating to silent crying. This modality is different from the collective, synchronous lamentation, and choreographed chest-beating of in-person majlis, but not less effective in reproducing the ‘emotional texture’ (Wolf 2000, 81) of Muharram. While mediation and remediation are not new to the history of Shia rituals, Sparey argues that through the televised majlis the pandemic has brought new voices to the fore, for example the voices of women who are otherwise not present within the male mourning tradition. These Covidian times have also prompted digitally mediated forms of worship, such as devotional talk shows, to re-orient their aesthetic to expectations of a spatially proximate ceremony.

During pre-pandemic Muharram rituals, when the mourned martyrs Hasan and Husain, the ritual leader, together with the mourners – the evoked and the evoking – are all ‘spatially compresent’. In televised Muharram, the mourners who join through a phone call from any ‘distance’ are not less ‘present’ in that sense. Televised majlis reproduces compresence by establishing a sense of ‘we’ among callers, audience, hosts, and actual pilgrims at the Karbala site/setting, where the martyrs’ tombs are physically present. Mainstream discourses on religion and Covid interpret the televised majlis as privatized, disembodied and apolitical. Instead, Sparey’s nuanced arguments suggest that viewers and mourners of the TV show #IAMHUSSEINI constitute a televisual majlis that is not merely composed of passive asynchronous consumption, but constitutes a way of feeling and forming community.

Digital religion is seldom made of digital-born or digital-only phenomena, but often blends ‘phygital’ realities that take place both physically and online. Utsa Mukherjee focuses our attention on blended Durga Puja rituals organized by the Hindu Bengali diaspora in the UK, a community that already had developed the resourcefulness, infrastructures and adaptability to fit ritual requirements into unprecedented circumstances. His netnographic vignettes include the case of a Brahmin priest and his wife who performed Durga Puja rites in a rented apartment while the entire country was under lockdown, and livestreamed the event via Facebook. While the recording of the priest’s performance could be visually enjoyed by audiences of devotees, the impossibility to mediate online the consumption of food offerings (bhog) led to another mediation: the home-delivery of consecrated food offerings. Thus in their pandemic reinvention of presence, each religious community has specific cultured dispositions that inform the ways in which they distribute tasks between offline and online mediations (Mukherjee 2022).

While the use of new media is often portrayed by outsider observers as disruptive, revolutionary, or peculiar to pandemic religiosities, scholars in this collection show that continuity and coherence with pre-existing theological and ritual concerns inform the ways new media are used, rejected, or complemented, if deemed insufficient to fulfill the requirements of presence. Mohammad Lutfi Bin Othman’s article (2022, this issue) demonstrates that mediations through videoconferencing apps are just the most recent reshaping of a continuing history of Sufi spiritual sound communicated through various mediations. Because of technological limitations, sonic glimpses and blips, this pandemic form of dhikr does not allow for a synchronous soundscape of collective chanting, dancing and breathing. Being unable to achieve a simultaneous sonic atmosphere, Singaporean Sufis had to stay ‘muted’ on the videoconferencing platform, while ‘singing their hearts out’ at home, sitting in front of the screen. As smartphone apps only allowed a partial reproduction of the ritual sensorium, the act of listening became the accentuated focus of the online majlis experience. The listening that they engage in, however, is not the atmospheric listening which engulfs them in the physical zawiya (the Sufi lodge). Rather, it is a cultivated and trained listening that is channeled through the earpiece and headphone, sharpened through the act of closing the eyes. Othman argues that the capacity of Singaporean Sufis to feel presence through the use of these technologies is achieved thanks to a particular spiritual disposition (Othman 2022).

An overarching frame connects the various case studies presented in these articles, namely a conceptual reading of media as reflexive and enchanted. Reflexive, because they do not only ‘host’ religious content but also change it, as the vessel shapes the message. In so doing, digital religion with all its medium-specific limitations and affordances ‘bends’ both the theology and the limits of the technology, in order to ‘bend’ the Covidian curve. Enchanted, because digital media are not only deemed appropriate to translocate sacred space and re-instantiate religious gatherings, but also agentive, in the way they perform the aspired transformations and feelings of presence. The pandemic therefore creates conditions that add to our understanding of new media and digital platforms as technologies always informed by considerations of the sacred, shaped by pre-existing cosmological, theological, and ritual concerns. One fingertip away, at the click on one link, pandemic Buddhists can earn karmic merit by bathing the baby Buddha online (Chia 2020). Far from neutral, cold, sterile, metallic, and empty, new media are always already inhabited (and some would say ‘haunted’; Sconce 2000) by imaginaries of the nonhuman and more-than-human world (Lagerkvist 2018) and carry along the imprint of receptive cosmologies and salvationist beliefs (Chandra 2020).

Sticky sensorium: reproducing embodiment at a distance

Why are food programmes so popular when no one at home gets to taste or even smell the food?

And is this what church is to become, a kind of simulacrum of itself, a digital representation of live-giving bread that is apparently offered, but cannot be eaten? (Fraser 2020)

Senses are primary mediators of presence in religious experience. Giles Fraser, journalist and priest in south London, likened the online Eucharistic celebration to the viewing of the popular television program Masterchef, an apt comparison to express his anxieties about a de-sensorialization of religious experience. Ritual practices mediated through the body sensorium, or ‘sensational forms’ (Meyer 2009), shape the sensibility, identity, and subjectivity of religious participants. However, during COVID-19 it is precisely the sense organs that are feared to be propagators and receptors of viral contagion. The ‘distance’ regulated by medical and governmental protocols is as much social as it is sensory. The tools of prevention from Covid infection – masks, shields, goggles, meters of spatial distance – constitute protective equipment as much as sensory deprivators, shielding the sensorium and buffering the self from its porous orifices.

In sanitized sacred spaces, virtual presence does not supplant embodied and sensory experience, but rather is complemented and enriched by corporeal acts on and in front of the screen, but also ‘off scene’ and behind the screens. While virtual reality and online platforms have been often discussed as producing a sensory deprivation‒a ‘culture of disembodiment’ (Willson 1997, 146)‒we recognize that digital forms of religious mediation are sensory experiences in their own right (Lorea 2020). Studies of liturgical practice in a digital world encourage us to take a nuanced approach to the question of whether online religion is of necessity disembodied (Berger 2018; Karapanagiotis 2010). At the same time, the feared de-sensorialization of religion during the Covid pandemic led us to wonder whether religions had not already been desensorialized, through the secularist ideologies of governmental legislations that aim at sanitizing public spaces from certain religious sounds, smells, colors and so on (banning religious music during street processions, for example; Sykes 2015). Instead of posing the realm of new media and audiovisual technologies in opposition to somatic spheres of religious experience, this thematic issue considers the multilayered and hierarchical ways in which pandemic-induced isolation and regulated distance triggered the recalibration of sensory engagements, while exploiting the intercorporeal affordances of screens, headphones, physical bodies and their avatars.

Within several traditions, communion is achieved through the sensorial modality of vision – for example obtaining darshan of a Hindu deity. Ethnographic studies suggest that when Hindu worship is translated to digital platforms, the online materializations of the deities do not present difficulty in how they replicate darshan through the mediation of the screen; indeed online darshan is almost as old as the internet itself (Karapanagiotis 2010; Scheifinger 2013, 126). Likewise, for evangelical communities in Brazil ‘the virtuality of the Internet does not seem an obstacle to the presence of Christ’ (de Almeida and Guerreiro 2020). But for Catholics the crucial materialized presence of Christ enabled through the sensory partaking in the Eucharist Mass was irreplaceable via digital media (Cressler 2020). The articles in this thematic issue not only underline continuity with previous, pre-pandemic ways of achieving presence (some would argue that even the recent dispensation of performing Baptism via zoom has ‘deep historical roots’; Boyd 2020). But the articles also uncover the deeply felt sense of bewilderment and loss that pandemic remediations have triggered because of the unprecedented constraints that community members perceived as ‘the absence of presence’ (Parish 2020). In other words, mediating proximity and distance also means negotiating lack of presence, absence and loss.

Nathanael Homewood’s article (2022, this issue) demonstrates how touch communicates, transmits, and is a point of receptivity between US-based Pentecostal pastor Benny Hinn’s hands and a remote audience. Homewood focuses on the reciprocity between touching and being touched in ‘Zoompartation’, which builds upon the haptic and audio-visual exchange that is an established part of the Pentecostal sensorium. This case not only adds to our understanding of Pentecostal healing. It also helps to embed the use of new media and communication platforms (Zoom, in this case) into a religiously informed sensorium. Messaging and video-conferencing apps are often discussed as disembodied or ocularcentric at best. Instead, the case of Zoompartation reveals how religious considerations of touchability and untouchability (see also Kloß 2020) inform the use of these softwares and their potential in engaging different sensory organs, awakening affects and emotional textures.

The importance of memory for the re-creation of sensory experiences through digital platforms comes into relief in Sarah Pike’s ethnography on the virtual Burning Man festival of 2020. To recreate the bodily sensations of the desert festival, Burners camped in their bedrooms, dressed in costumes, burned incense in front of the screen, and placed desert sand next to their computers. Experiences at the virtual temple thus appear as both disembodied and re-materialized. Pike’s ethnography of Burners who share stories of the departed ones they mourn at the virtual temple with others’ avatars exemplifies how virtual reality can generate intimate rituals of catharsis even at a distance. This ritual remembrance and reenactment of the live event through online platforms works ‘like a muscle’, as one of her interlocutors said, likening the affective awakening of ritual behavior to the spurring body-memory involved in spiritual postures, attitudes and gestures. Mimesis and fidelity – ‘sticking’ to the past tradition of sensory engagement – shaped the ways in which technological devices became extensions of the self, animated with desire for connection. Yet too, ‘VR sickness nausea and headaches’ reminded Burners that the apparently disembodied and desensorialized experience of a virtual festival is very much experienced through the body, for good and for bad.

The ‘stickiness’ observed in our articles refers to the urge of ritual practitioners to remember and replicate, whether online, at home or in new forms of embodiments, their cultivated and socialized sensory frameworks-physical gestures, smells, ways of listening and sensing the world. Such stickiness has an inverse implication from what the anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966) detailed in her famous discussion of pollution, with the feel of sticky, defiling substances which universally lend to a phenomenological sensation that the body’s integrity is in danger. For Douglas, the vim and vigor involved in scrubbing the dirt from surfaces, and creating material order, like the ritual acts carried out in traditional religious milieus, serve as prophylaxis against disease and danger. The stickiness we refer to with respect to the sensorium of the ritual participant connotes the ways in which apotropaic and prophylactic spiritual substances efficaciously linger on, beyond ritually delimited time-spaces.

The digital pilgrim, the virtual Burner, the Facebook worshiper, the livestreamed spirit medium, all employ the body sensorium in synaesthetic ways. Their senses are never compartmentalized, but rather overlap, interact, and cooperate in ways that are unique to their religiously informed habitus (Classen 1991). In Nathanael Homewood’s article on Zoompartation discussed above, the eyes of healer and healed are ‘doing the touch’: in the absence of skin-to-skin touch, the healing and salvific con-tact is performed through audio-visual prompting. In a similar way Alvin Lim’s article on online consultations with spirit mediums underlines the ‘haptic function’ of the eyes in these digital mediations. In a previous piece, Lim compared the sensorium of Taoist social media users with the visual, yet multisensory engagements of Singaporean online church services, where worshipers are asked to close their eyes to ‘feel’ the presence (Lim 2020). Stepping beyond the anthropocentric sensorium, his analysis on social media interactions between Chinese devotees, deities, and spirit mediums, emerges from a post-human understanding of sensory engagements, whereby also ‘gods have eyes’ in the form of cameras through which they can ‘see’ the devotees and their offerings. The devotees’ screens in turn allow the gods to ‘be seen’ in a reciprocal digital sensorium that enables the reproducibility of Taoist prayers online (Lim 2020, 2022). Elsewhere, Mani Rao (2019) notes that visions, for practitioners of mantric meditation, are not only optical experiences. These studies underline the need for a synaesthetic approach to sensory studies of religions, including digital religions.

While the reciprocal act of seeing‒darshan, in the vocabulary of Hindu rituals‒can be easily transposed online, Utsa Mukherjee’s article on diasporic Durga Pujas demonstrates that not everything that is ritually significant could be performed via Facebook. Chat box functions replicate physical gestures and embodied offerings: emoticons of folded hands and hibiscus flowers, which devotees would typically bring to the goddess’ presence, populate the live comments of livestreamed Durga Pujas. But the sticky sensorium of his Bengali Hindu interlocutors required ritual interactions that exceeded the audio-visual affordances of these online media. Acts like the communal sharing of consecrated food offerings (bhog), partaking of the heat of sacred fire (homa), and applying the auspicious marks of sindur powder, had to rely upon other arrangements outside of the enchanted cyberspace – for example, home delivery of pre-packaged portions of bhog, and of an aluminum foil that has vicariously captured the heat of sacred fire. These examples demonstrate that maintaining embodied continuity is essential in order to ensure ritual efficacy and the fulfillment of ritual obligations even ‘at a distance’. They also demonstrate that auspiciousness, blessings and other ritually performed transformations ‘stick’ to the substance of the ritual ingredients and can be sensed outside of the traditional ritual time and space, and can thus be transported and even home-delivered.

In Mohammad Lutfi Bin Othman’s article, Singaporean Sufi practitioners responded creatively to the technological limitations and the impossibility of sharing collective experiences of sounds through videoconferencing platforms that are designed, instead, for a single male-podium-speech voice. Subverting the sensory assumptions of these videoconferencing apps, the Shadhili Sufis strived to achieve the sonic performance of presence (hadra) through their attuned and cultivated way of listening through the earpiece. To do so, they had to reconstruct their choral practices as antiphonic, with one person ‘unmuted’ and the others repeating with or chanting together behind their muted microphones (Othman 2022).

This strategic recourse to religious repertoires of sensory mobilization at a time of social (and sensory) distancing, is not surprisingly new; ritual communities possess a pandemic archive (Meyer 2020) of liturgical innovations and dispensations that they implement in times of crisis to perpetuate their concerns for achieving presence. During the sixteenth century quarantine, to prevent the spread of the pestilence in southern Europe, households were summoned to prayer by the ringing of bells across the parish. Maintaining isolation through an ad hoc religious soundscape, litanies and supplications were chanted with one group singing from the windows or the doors of their homes, and another group singing in response. Antiphonic interactive rituals in that early modern era enabled participants to ‘project themselves back onto the streets and re-join each other virtually’ during a time of confinement at home (Chiu 2018) which bears striking similarities with the Covidian interactions between practitioners.

These cases add to our understanding of the relationship between religion and the senses, and between body and technology. Whereas online rituals are often discussed as disembodied (and particularly so during the Covid pandemic; Campbell 2020b, 57) this collection of articles digs deep into the latent sensory epistemologies of screens, machines and headphones. In discussing the use of new technologies as extensions and expansions of bodily limbs and sensory organs, we are also reminded of the impossibility to substitute the multisensory religious experience on new media without a sense of loss and absence, which ritual communities navigate in dynamic, ‘sensuously rich and improvisational’ ways (Pike 2022).

Pandemic sacredness in space and time: modular and transposable, condensed while expanding

New research at the interface of religion, politics, and the Covid pandemic has cogently employed the virus as a privileged lens to discuss the theopolitics that shapes the management of the ‘virus with a crown’ (Crosson 2020), and the ‘holy infrastructure’ of digital mediation (Mellquist Lehto 2020a). Sacred geographies have become increasingly portable, pushed by their ritual practitioners’ decisions to ‘move’ – online, outdoors, or inside of private homes – or to ‘re-move’ – e.g., suspend events, postpone gatherings, or urgently send missionaries home from their evangelizing trips abroad (see Bialecki’s article). Out of necessity, itineraries of religious movement were revised and rethought. Indeed, the very geospatial positions and eschatological timelines from which transcendence may be achieved were reconfigured, reinvigorating apocalyptic prognostications, as well as millenarian anxieties and sensibilities about religious aptitude and virtuosity (Bialecki 2022, this issue).

Mundane spaces, such as homes, balconies and streets (Cooper 2021), are appropriated for religious uses in the face of the closure of ‘official’ religious sites such as temples, mosques, and churches. Digital platforms became new ‘places’ and platforms of worship in their own right. ‘Substituting sanctuaries for their sofas’, devotees found new parameters of ritual accessibility (Bhambra and Tiffany 2021). The global pandemic has widely extended the sacred into the ‘unofficially’ sacred space (Kong 2005; Heng 2016) of living rooms, laptops and devices which are often assumed to be secular. Traditional religious authorities fear an erosion of in-person worship, a non-return to the pre-pandemic normal.

The mobilization of ‘unofficially’ sacred space for ritual performance often involves a process of (digital-)religious place-making. In their ethnography of temple rituals during Covid in south China, Ningning Chen, Chen, and Dean (2022) documented how local residents reconfigured their domestic spaces into religious spaces, for instance, redesigning a part of their living rooms to accommodate home shrines and using the open space of balconies for worship purposes. Through shrine installations and domesticated ritual practices, the home space becomes what della Dora (2018) terms an ‘infra-secular space’: a space which blends the sacred and secular (see Kong 2002). Apart from the physical religious place-making, a virtual process of place-making becomes prominent in the Covidian age. In her ethnographic study of virtual Burning Man, Sarah Pike shows how digital sacred place-making responds to pre-existing requirements and ideologies. Organizers and participants ritually ‘cleansed their house’ before the virtual festival, burned incense, meditated, and applied techniques to purify body and space. In so doing, they tried to make these arrangements ‘fit’ for a transformational event in the impossibility of traveling ‘in person’ to Black Rock City (Pike 2022). In her study, ritual place-making not only blurs the sacred-secular boundaries but also helps forge a sense of comfort and belonging among participants.

In many ways, spatial extension has triggered spiritual practitioners’ (re)construction of the notion of sacredness during the pandemic. Mohammad Lutfi Bin Othman’s article on Shadhili Sufi rituals in Singapore demonstrates that the remembrance of God can be practiced everywhere rather than being grounded in any physical religious place such as the mosque or the Sufi lodge (zawiya). When scattered seekers gather online, the zawiya is anywhere the Shadhili engages in the sonic practice of dhikr (Othman 2022). The sacred place thus emerges as multipliable rather than unique and geographically anchored. This alternative notion of sacred place is not only manifest in the Muslim world, but also in many other places of worship which have become modular and transposable in pandemic times.

Abiding by Singapore’s strict safety regulations, the spiritual seekers of Othman’s article perform ‘listening as presence’ by employing an Islamic acoustemology to overcome the technical disturbances of their newly mediatized soundscapes. In a similar vein, Alvin Lim’s study of Chinese popular religion reveals that ‘presence’ manifests as ‘audience’, involving new religious publics and their aural, oral, visual and digital interaction with the divine. In this sense, perceptions of ‘presence’ have been substantially shifted while religious adherents experience spatial reconfiguration of the sacred. In Lim’s case study, practices that were perceived to be marginalized, private and intimate, such as one on one consultations with the spirit mediums channeling underworld gods, leap out of their usual settings, becoming visible and strikingly public, when they are livestreamed, displayed, and stored online via social media. Through the digital interface of Facebook, the disembodied bodies of spirit mediums, as if one yet multiplied, perform the underworld gods’ collective stance that they are still available and active in a time of crisis (Lim 2022).

The appropriation of secular and domestic spaces imposes various constraints for practitioners’ experiences of the sacred. In Othman’s study, when the Sufi gathering takes ‘place’ online, Muslim seekers often experience unwanted soundscapes: of public transport, crying infants or disappointed wives. Striving to get a feeling of the zawiya from home, male Sufi participants would burn smoky incense that penetrates the smellscape of the other home dwellers (Othman 2021). Seekers logging in to videoconferencing apps from home have to engage ‘loudly’ in their sonic participation at times, which also leads to the displeasure and bewilderment of household members. In short, the translocation of the sacred space into the home involves a renegotiation of domestic spaces and times (Zakaria 2020a), but also of gender roles and expectations (Johari 2020).

Apart from spatial reconfigurations, pandemic times concurrently engender temporal transformations of the sacred. Chen, Chen, and Dean (2022) reveal how local residents in south China adopted temporal adaptations such as early morning worship and shorter visits in response to the state-directed closure of public worship places, thereby fulfilling their wish to perform rituals in the temples without getting caught. Simplified and shorter ritual performance is also evident in Utsa Mukherjee’s documentation of the shifting duration of diasporic Durga Puja. Hindu Bengalis in the UK had to accommodate a new schedule and condensed the festival from an originally five-day plan to a three-day weekend. During the Covid pandemic, in-person participation was possible only for a limited number of people and for a limited time with strict distancing rules. Those participants who could not attend in-person have to struggle with different time zones to gain involvement in live streaming ritual performance. Moreover, the new ritual temporalities of online Durga Puja had to juggle the schedules of state-sanctioned curfews and lockdown, the astrological timing of auspiciousness, and the temporal availability of ritual specialists who might be stuck in a different country during the pandemic.

Mukherjee’s article demonstrates how live-streamed rituals condense diasporic time and space with members of the audience participating from their domestic spaces in England, India and elsewhere. In addition, digital tools and platforms can extend the duration of sacred time as it becomes archived: the posts of ritual performances are kept on Facebook and can be re-played at different times. Just like the ritual events themselves, are characterised by ephemerality (St John 2020), these are also archives of a transient, fluid and ephemeral kind (Mukherjee 2022). As Lim’s study shows, the digitalization of spirit possession and consultation with spirit mediums can be replayed and repeated a multitude of times. As such, sacred time gets stretched whereas space/distance gets condensed. Thinking broadly about the shifting temporalities of online ritual performance, and the significance of social media as new ritual archives, Lim further conceptualizes the time of spirit mediums consultations as both live and durational, meeting at a digital interface that can reach multiple smartphones, web browsers and computers at the same time (Lim 2022). The duration of the sacred has its own electronic temporality tied to the performative act, while a spiritually-charged moment can be recorded and given future presence and efficacy. What is more, different technological means provide for different spatiotemporal affordances: synchronous, asynchronous, monological, dialogical, etc., offering a range of possibilities in the ways ritual specialists can interact with their followers. For example, Zoompartation, or healing through Zoom-mediated touch (Homewood 2022) offers a kind of real-time interaction with the Pentecostal healer that is significantly different from the technologically-mediated healing by radio and television offered by his predecessors.

Besides adaptation and implementation of new ritual temporalities as a ‘response’ to the Covid pandemic, religious communities have mobilized their onto-cosmologies in order to understand, react to, and make sense of the Covidian times, pivoting on their pre-existing conceptions of time, disease, and disaster (Lorea et al. forthcoming). In Ethiopia, both Christians and Muslims interpreted the Covid-19 pandemic as God’s punishment; in such retributive theodicy, prayer, fasting, and congregating in places of worship became important as means to invoke mercy (Østebø, Tronvoll, and Østebø 2021). Theologies built around cyclical conceptions of time interpret the Covid pandemic as an effect of collective karma in the wheel of periodical creation, preservation and destruction. Yiguandao and Hoa Hao Buddhists sought to restore the balance with offerings of free vegetarian food (Shen 2020; Vo Duy 2021). Theologies sustaining linear temporalities of beginning and end of times instead propose different interpretations, and resort to their eschatologies when they understand the contemporary Covid crisis as an unfolding of the apocalypse.

Mormon missionaries who were stationed abroad received news that celebrities from their own communities too had been afflicted by the Coronavirus. These pivotal moments in the Covidian timeline, for Jon Bialecki’s missionary interlocutors signaled moments when the severity of the pandemic had begun to dawn in their awareness. Bialecki cogently details what this awareness has meant for Mormons’ conception of the eschaton, and generatively draws upon Robbins’s conception of ‘everyday millennialism’ (2001) to delineate what the shifting sands of eschatological worry has meant for the managerial practices of the LDS Church as it has sought to navigate the vicissitudes of the pandemic. Bialecki details how devotees respect the Church’s capacities to act as a well-oiled ‘machine’, and their able management of pre-millennial tensions in accord with the specific entailments of Mormon history, eschatological timelines, and hierophanic centers. Devotees recognize bureaucratic efficiency itself as exemplary of Mormon virtuosity. Addressing the self-described vernacular conceptions of Mormon ‘peculiarities’, Bialecki demonstrates how these administrative competencies paradoxically allow the LDS religious authorities to curtail the very apocalyptic affects that are at the core of their ‘Latter Days’ prophecy (Bialecki 2022).

The above temporal-spatial reconfigurations during the pandemic also drive us to ponder over the extent to which the pandemic has led to new transformations, and to what extent it rather amplifies or builds on longing-lasting trends. Price (2020) points out that digital churches, whether they are satellite Sunday services, church meetings in Second Life, or Twitter communities of evangelicals, did not start because of a global pandemic – but were already here, creating a space for lived religion with a different kind of accessibility. Recreating presence online has been an ongoing effort within diasporic communities. All these digital community-making sites ‘expand our definitions of what a religious space can be and force us to confront what aspects of religion are truly sacred’ (Price 2020, 46). In other words, the pandemic presents a time of crisis with long-lasting effects, not unlike circumstances or historical moments in which religious practitioners had to adapt and reshape their rituals (for instance in response to rapid urbanization, forced migration, or natural disasters). Yet, the pandemic lens serves as a magnifying-glass for us to analyze religious creativity, innovation and spatiotemporal ‘transportability’ in times of crisis.

Conclusions

Historical research on past epidemics informs us that exceptional health crises with prolonged impact across time and space have profound consequences in shaping human traditions and religious beliefs. For example, scholars have suggested that the Black Death epidemic in fourteenth century Europe produced a decline in people’s reliance upon the supernatural and a turn towards humanity, which emerged in the intellectual anthropocentrism of the Renaissance (Mark 2020). Such ‘disenchantment’ of the world stemming from existential crises is far from the findings of this collection: if anything, the evidence and the arguments brought forward by our authors would rather emphasize the enchantment of technology, the ‘stickiness’ of pre-pandemic religious sensoria, and the sacralization of assumedly secular spaces and times.

These observations are made possible by the methodological approaches of the articles in this collection: they are not only ‘netnographies’ (Kozinets 2015) and discourse analyses of what is publicly available online, but also benefit from a combination of remote ethnography (through phone interviews and social media), digital ethnographies (involving first-hand participation in online religious mediations), and long-term in-person ethnography in pre-Covid times. This kind of research offers an understanding of what happens also behind the screens, offline and ‘off scene’. In this way, the authors in this thematic issue provide contextualized and nuanced understandings of pandemic temporo-spatialities of the sacred, new entanglements between religion and media, and between body sensorium and technology.

While pandemic religious modalities are often imagined as producing disruptive changes in the lives of religious practitioners, we shed light on the continuity of pandemic responses with pre-pandemic trends, as they unfold in accordance with pre-existing cosmologies, theologies, liturgies, and social hierarchies of presence. The ritual innovations discussed in this collection can provoke new kinds of sensory engagements but also often rely on memories of previous sensory experiences during ritual performances, in a delicate balance between mimesis and transgressive creativity. The emergent practices described in this collection, such as Facebook consultations with Chinese spirit mediums, the televisual mourning rituals of Muharram, Pentecostal haptic healing via Zoompartation, the spiritualization of domesticity through the performance of Sufi dhikr via videoconferencing apps, illuminate significant new areas where further research and new methodological approaches are needed to account for unprecedented forms of ritual practice that might outlive the pandemic and become mainstream in post-Corona times.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carola E. Lorea

Carola E. Lorea is a scholar interested in oral traditions and lived religion in South Asia, Tantric traditions, and sound. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Religion and Globalisation cluster of Asia Research Institute, NUS. She received research fellowships from IIAS, Gonda Foundation (Leiden) and SAI (Heidelberg) to study travelling archives of songs in the borderlands of India and Bangladesh. Her first monograph (Folklore, Religion and the Songs of a Bengali Madman, Brill 2016) discussed the intersections of religion, displacement and sacred sounds through the lens of performance. Her articles appeared on American Anthropologist, Asian Ethnologist, Asian Medicine, Religions, History and Society of South Asia, Religion and the Arts etc. Her current book project on the Matua community employs sounds and songs to discuss caste, religion and displacement in the Bay of Bengal.

Neena Mahadev

Neena Mahadev is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale-NUS College, and a Research Associate in ARI's Religion and Globalization Cluster. Her ethnographic research centers on Buddhism, Christianity, and politicized religious media and mediations in Sri Lanka, as well as on dynamic inter-Asian movements between Singapore and Sri Lanka. Her work has appeared in Current Anthropology, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society, Religion and Society, Hau Journal, and Cambridge Journal of Anthropology. She serves as an editorial board member of the Journal of Global Buddhism, and of the New Directions in the Anthropology of Christianity book series (Bloomsbury). Her book manuscript, Of Karma and Grace: Mediating Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka, is under contract with Columbia University Press.

Natalie Lang

Natalie Lang is Associated Junior Fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt, and affiliated to the Centre d'études et de recherche sur l'Inde, l'Asie du Sud et sa diaspora, Université du Québec à Montréal (CERIAS-UQAM). She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Religion and Globalisation Cluster and the Asian Urbanisms Cluster at the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore (NUS). She is the author of Religion and Pride: Hindus in Search of Recognition in La Réunion (Berghahn Books, 2021).

Ningning Chen

Ningning Chen is Research Fellow at Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore (NUS). She obtained her PhD from the Department of Geography, NUS. Her research interests include the fields of religion and sacred space, rurality and rural-urban interface, Chinese diaspora and Chinese voluntary associations. She has publications in The China Quarterly, Journal of Rural Studies, Population, Space and Place, Social and Cultural Geography, Cultural Geographies, Mobilities, and Tourism Geographies. She is currently working on a major research project about Chinese voluntary associations in Southeast Asia.

Notes

1 These questions have been at the core of the documentation and digital archiving project of CoronAsur (https://ari.nus.edu.sg/coronasur-home/), the Asia-focused research blog on religion and COVID-19 curated and edited by the guest-editors of this thematic issue, and colleagues at the Asia Research Institute in Singapore, particularly Dr. Emily Hertzman, Dr. Erica Larson and Dr. Show Ying Ruo. These questions are also at the heart of a forthcoming volume titled CoronAsur: Asian Religions in the Covidian Age (UHP, forthcoming). Furthermore, we have discussed these issues extensively during a workshop on ‘Religion and the COVID-19 pandemic: Mediating presence and distance.’ After two weeks of asynchronous online discussions, the workshop culminated with two days of live panel discussions with sixteen participants. The editors of this Issue convened that workshop with the generous support of a collaborative seed grant for the research project ‘Religion Going Viral: Pandemic Transformation and Ritual Innovations in Asia’ offered by the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and the Yap Kim Hao Memorial Fund for the Study of Religion at Yale-NUS College (PIs: Carola Lorea and Neena Mahadev).

2 With the phrase ‘receptive cosmologies’, Lorea, Lang, Hertzman, and Larson analyze the various ways in which Asian communities have mobilized familiar repertoires of religious stories, myths, and symbols to cope with and counter the Covid pandemic. They demonstrate that cosmologies and religious narratives can serve as frames to understand the self and the world in times of uncertainties. Religious communities have drawn on pre-existing techniques, narratives and knowledge to make sense of the pandemic and to fight against, or co-exist with the viral disease. Numerous and diverse expiatory, apotropaic, expulsive, protective, salvific, and healing rituals of diverse religious communities provide telling examples of how these repertoires are crucial in understanding and confronting the pandemic, even if the pandemic is not necessarily perceived in line with previous disasters. See Lorea et al. (forthcoming).

3 Performed physically on site and live-streamed or uploaded for remote online participation. This term was used by Singapore’s City Harvest Church in relation to the live-streaming and uploading of church services on their website (www.chc.org.sg/onsite/).