Zandbergen, D. (2010). Silicon Valley New Age. The Co-constitution of the Digital and the Sacred. In S. Aupers, & D. Houtman (Eds.), Religions of Modernity: Relocating the Sacred to the Self and the Digital (pp. 161-186). Leiden: Brill.

I wrote this chapter during my PhD research in the San Francisco Bay Area. It represents my first findings regarding ‘New Edge’ culture – a cross-over between New Age spirituality and high tech culture, which self-consciously and often ironically celebrates spirituality through high tech, and which approaches technology as a natural force of life.  New Edge culture breaks with, what Michael Saler has called “a cliché of our times”, which is the idea that science and technology are disenchanting forces in society (2004: 138). Instead, the New Edge’s celebration of the sacred through science and technology (and vice versa) points to other ways in which the sacred is evoked in contemporary Western society.

You can download the chapter here.

The final dissertation about this topic can be found here.