Paper short abstract:

This paper reports on the initial findings of the ReCoVirA-project in Finland, focusing on the respective strategies employed by three Finnish religious communities for devising digital solutions to counter the restrictions and disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reports on the initial findings of the ReCoVirA-project in Finland. It focuses on the main strategies that three different and varyingly established religious communities in Finland employed as part of their respective efforts to create digital solutions to the disruptions and restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. These religious communities include the institutional Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, the firmly established Jehovah’s Witnesses in Finland, and the smaller, locally grounded Liên Tâm Buddhist monastery in Turku. In light of the Religious-Social Shaping of Technology-approach, this paper provides a comparative analysis of the “communal framing” that these religious communities respectively engaged in when devising their own digital solutions to counter the effects of the pandemic. The analysis therefore focuses on 1) the particular ways in which these communities perceived their digital solutions to be supportive of their established values and practices; 2) the particular ways in which they strove to define and delineate the boundaries and potential long-term effects of these solutions; and 3) the main ways in which the solutions devised were argued to be supportive of the preservation of their own respective understandings of religious community.