Dear list-members, the second issue of the relatively young and yet unknown "Online - Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet" covering the topic "Rituals on the Internet" is online. Please see: http://online.uni-hd.de. The journal consists of the following papers: Kalinock, Sabine: Going on Pilgrimage Online - the Represenation of Shia Rituals on the Internet. Jakobsh, Doris R.: Authority in the Virtual Sangat: Sikkhism, Ritual and Identity in the Twenty-First Century. Rudolph, Michael: Ethnic Revival, and the Reappearance of Indigenous Religions in the ROC - the Use of the Internet in the Construction of Taiwanese Identities. Radde-Antweiler, Kerstin: Rituals Online: Transferring and Designing Rituals. Casey, Cheryl Anne: Virtual Faith - the Revirtualization of Religious Ritual in Cyberspace. MacWilliams, Marc: Techno-Ritualization - the Gohozon Controversy on the Internet. We're planning another special issue covering the topic "Virtual Worlds". I send you the Call for Paper as a text below. Additionally we're excepting other articles for publication dealing with religion and internet all the time. Just send them to: online-journal@zegk.uni-heidelberg.de I would be gratefull, if you recommended our journal and the possibility to publication. With best greetings from Heidelberg (Germany) Yours sincerly Kerstin Dipl. Theol. Kerstin Radde-Antweiler SFB 619 Teilprojekt C 2 Institut für Religionswissenschaft der Universität Heidelberg Akademiestr. 4-8 69117 Heidelberg Tel.: +49-(0)6221-547482 Fax : +49-(0)6221-547424 Email: kerstin.radde@zegk.uni-heidelberg.de URL: http://www.rituals-online.uni-hd.de/en/ Call for Paper "Virtual Worlds" In the academic field of "Cultural Studies", like in other cultural and social disciplines, the relevance of the Internet as new media is constantly increasing. New areas of scholarly research are to be found on homepages, weblogs, in chat rooms, in newsgroups and in virtual 3D environments, where religious and spiritual topics are presented and incessantly negotiated. The Internet could be seen as a ?cultural context of its own right", as Christine Hine stated in her programmatic book "Virtual ethnography". In this respect it has become an important part of our cultural and scientific assets, heritage and memory. As such it also forms, modifies and creates new cultural structures. Therefore, the challenges of this media provide the scholar with materials in a still mainly unexplored field of research, demanding new scientific methods and methodologies in order to analyse the likewise new realm of religious beliefs and utterances in this virtual space. In the context of Internet Research, Virtual Worlds offer a new environment to meet, communicate and perform social and cultural activity in a virtual reality, irrespective of geographical and real-life body conditions. Examples for such Virtual Worlds - understood as digital spaces, occupied in large part by human controlled agents, known as avatars, participating in a collective virtual space? (Krausnick 2004) - are Active Worlds and The Palace - both in use since 1995 - and There since 1998. The most prominent and famous example is the privately-owned, subscription-based 3D application Second Life that went online for the public in 2003. An increasing number of residents use such environments not only as a kind of virtual playground but as an enlargement of their real-life possibilities. And this ?virtual life? has to be taken seriously: The users are both socially and religiously very active and consequently transfer real-life activities into virtual space. For the next issue of the new Journal Online - Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet (http://online.uni-hd.de), we are planning to edit a special edition with the working title "Virtual Worlds". The essays we are inviting should deal with the notions of cultural and / or religious activities in Virtual Worlds like Second Life and MMOGs such as Everquest, World of Warcraft, etc. Possible topics or foci of the special issue: 1) Religion and Rituals 2) Methodology 3) Offline-Online Relations Other topics that correspond to the subject of the issue are equally welcome. We encourage abstracts from all areas of research. Please send title and abstract (no more than 350 words) of your proposed paper as well as some short biodata of the author/s as email-text to Kerstin Radde-Antweiler (kerstin.radde@zegk.uni-heidelberg.de) by January 4th, 2007. Later submissions will not be accepted. A decision on the contents of the volume will be made on the basis of anonymous reviews of the abstracts, and all authors of abstracts will be informed by January 30th, 2007. Authors will have to be prepared to submit their finished papers (no more than 8000 words) by March 15th, 2007. Then, these will be reviewed and possibly returned to the authors with suggestions from the editors. It is planned to publish the volume by Mid 2007. Dipl. Theol. Kerstin Radde-Antweiler Centre for European Historical and Cultural Studies Institute for Religious Studies Akademiestr. 4-8 D-69117 Heidelberg Germany