The emerging church blogosphere appears at the convergence of a number of factors that are of interest to researchers in the fields of sociology, religion and media. Firstly there is the perceived re-entrance (what Casanova calls the “deprivatisation”) of institutional religion into the public, mass-mediated, sphere of secular society (Breward, 1988: ; Casanova, 1994). This re-entrance is conditioned by the language of partisan politics, that tends to place religious groups and identities along a single moral-political spectrum (Thompson, 1994). Then, there is the postmodern search for a religious identity that correlates with a post-structuralist worldview against declining religious institutions and a rapidly growing spiritual marketplace (Davis, 1998: ; Finke and Stark, 2005: ; Heelas and Martin, 1998). Thirdly, there is the rise of the personal, or as Castells puts it, the “me-centred”, network as a dominant pattern of sociability in late modernity, that challenges conceptions of family and embedded communities as main determinants of cultural (and religious) identity (Castells, 2001).

While the first three factors mentioned are offline, they offer a ground for the reception and use of the Internet for the purposes of religion. Highlighted are concerns and debates about the nature of “virtual” identity, community and religious experience, seen as incomplete, duplicitous, and mere “play”, or as continuous with offline identity and interaction in the quest for authenticity (Hine, 2000: ; Kennedy, 2006: ; Turkle, 1996). Internet research also calls into question the promises that the blogosphere promotes: democratisation of public voices, the blurring of public and private discourses, and the blurring of distinctions between producer, user and media text (Beer and Burrows, 2007: ; van Dijck, 2009). Moreover, while the blogosphere promises a parliament on the usefulness of religious practices and structures in the construction of authentic religious identity, whether it does so on certain terms is an important consideration. It must be asked, what discursive products and practices are required for entry into the blogosphere, and by what conditions are people given voice and authority (Turner, 2007).

At the nexus of these debates and theses is the theorisation of the spiritual cyborg: one who seeks to enhance their connection with the word and understanding of their place in it through connection with technology (Brasher, 2001: ; Davis, 1998: ; Gunkel, 2007). This concept, as an object of study, has mutated in the short history of research into online religion, in which Højsgaard and Warburg (2005) have identified three “waves”. In this research a fourth “wave” is proposed, informed by recent developments in Internet technology and usage. In this fourth wave it is acknowledged that:

· going online is no longer a discrete step (Thomas, 2006);

· the Internet is also a window for the world to see the individual user, and not just the other way around (Thomas, 2006);

· research into religion online should not just consider what online content is religious and what is not, but what is religious about the project of creating online content (Lövheim, 2008); and

· the same research should not just consider online environments as peculiar religious spaces, but forums for considering the place of religion in all parts of life (Cheong, Halavais et al., 2008: ; Lövheim, 2008).