Digital religion, as a field of inquiry and as an academic discipline, has been around for more than twenty years now. Not surprisingly, and especially due to the growing acceptance and intensifying interest in the study of religion and digital media, the field has diversified over time. The expanding scope and shape of studies on digital religion increasingly include new research fields, technological genres and spaces, themes, questions, and adequate new approaches, methods, and theoretical frames. This keynote looks into two distinct examples for this.

It opens with presenting central themes, approaches, and perspectives in the still novel subfield of digital religion research, digital Hinduism. By today, Hindu actors (individuals, groups or institutions) vastly interact with digital spaces and as a consequence (re)negotiate and (re)construct contemporary Hindu beliefs and practices. The used technology is wide-ranging and includes but is not limited to social media such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and Instagram, online streaming such as Live Darshan, and video games. The keynote’s second part then focuses on the latter, on video games and gaming as an increasingly important media genre and space for digital religion research. Illustrated with examples from Indian video games it especially discusses the potential of applying novel approaches and lenses – such as the analytical concept of value formations and the broader lens of cultural heritage – to discover, describe and study underlying or implicit religious topics in video games.