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Why Do Christian Churches Build Congregations Online? examines the different ways that Christian churches and denominations perceive and use digital media in their external work. This is explored through three different case studies, with dissimilar approaches to digital media, to understand the prerequisites and conditions for media usage from a religious institutional perspective. The case studies included are as follows:

• The Charismatic movement (with Pentecostal origin)
• The Church of Sweden
• The Laestadian movement

These cases range from a positive and outgoing attitude toward digital media to a hesitant and reluctant approach. The highly secularized and digitally permeated Swedish society gives the context in which the religious institutions must relate and understand themselves in relation to. From a mediatization approach, the national context limits and sets presumptions for the negotiating process. This volume provides an understanding of the relationship between external (societal) and internal factors (such as theology and historical origin). This book will also broaden the understanding of the field of "digital religion" and emphasize the need to discuss contemporary religion in terms of "religion in a digital age".

This study examines parish deacons’ perspectives on the impact the digital transformation of society has had on diaconal work in the Church of Sweden. Based on individual interviews with seven parish deacons, it explores the following research question: What are the perceptions of deacons in the Church of Sweden regarding the impact of the digital transformation on their work within their parishes? The study shows that deacons encounter challenges such as digital exclusion, ethical dilemmas, and the need for both physical and digital meeting places. It highlights the complexities and opportunities that digital tools bring to diaconal work, emphasizing the importance of digital competence, ongoing dialogue, and ethical reflection in navigating changes brought about by the digitalization of society.

 Society is transforming due to changes in demographics, the environment, and technology, and thus faces multiple challenges. In this context, data coordination and access, collectively referred to as the digital transformation, are key to addressing anticipated societal tensions.

This interview-based qualitative study focuses on how researchers responsible for large-scale population-based research infrastructure view the opportunities and dilemmas in play in the intersection between data and personal privacy. The objective is to look beyond the glossy formulations of official strategy documents to see how the digital transformation (more specifically, data-driven research) is perceived from the active researcher’s point of view, and what the intellectual negotiation process is like. What is of interest here is how the accessibility of register data is legitimized, and what developments and significant changes are simultaneously taking place. The research questions are:

1) How does the research community acknowledge the tensions and dilemmas between the possible risks and harms of large-scale, data-driven, population-based research, and its potential benefits?

2) How are the accessibility and coordination of research data justified and discussed by the research community, given the risks and potential, in relation to political and societal goals and policies?

With the contemporary Swedish research context as a point of departure, these research questions are addressed based on policy documents about digitalization, and on interviews with researchers.

Essentially all academic research of today relies on analysis of data from a wide range of sources. Several underpinning, and rapidly developing, technologies are supporting the analysis of this data. Visualization serves as an interface to this ecosystem of tools and methods and integrates them into environments supporting scientific workflows, effectively sharing cognitive load between computers and humans. There is, however, a gap between the state-of-the-art in visual data analysis and current wide-spread academic practice. Support for the introduction of new, improved and tailored, visual data analysis environments thus has the potential to address challenges involving large and complex data, creating competitive advantages for researchers. To fill the gap and capitalize on this opportunity, the InfraVis initiative has been created in Sweden with the mission to operate an infrastructure consisting of visualization experts, software solutions, and access to high-end visualization laboratories. Users of InfraVis are offered assistance through a national helpdesk with rapid response times as well as more in-depth projects addressing specific data and software challenges. InfraVis provides software solutions based on development within connected research groups, curation of international software and best practice, and user training in the form of courses, seminars and on-line documentation. To build an infrastructure with national coverage, we have pooled together nine visualization environments in Sweden interconnected in a nodal structure. The nodes are hosted in proximity to research environments in visualization, which enables direct access to the research front as well as to state-of-art facilities. The governance structure of InfraVis is based on the leading researchers in visualization in Sweden as well as an international advisory board.

This chapter deals with the Church of Sweden’s digital communication.The focus is on how to be a church in a digital age. The chapter is primarily examining and discussing how digital communicationis perceived and discussed in terms of need, possibilities and limitations. The concrete “how” of this communication in the different online channels is not of particular interest here.

Today, the church has developed its web presence through for example websites, blogs and social media channels. The main argument for being online is the importance of being where people are. It is argued that when people (in general) tend to spend more and more time online, the church should be online too. This is in line with the idea that the Church of Sweden is a folk church. The web gives the church the possibility to be present all over the country, and beyond – and this is seen as part of its mission.

The informants describe the necessity for the church to be online, and how online communication opens up possibilities to reach new people. Simultaneously, concerns are expressed that online communication might make the idea of the folk church more difficult to maintain, because people are given the possibility of picking and choosing only certain parts of church life.

One challenge, expressed by the informants, is to organise communication work in tandem with established church structures. However, informants have seen the work of communication officers (and their likes) gradually becoming closer to, and partly integrated into, everyday work within the church structure.

Digital communication is here to stay, and consequently, the church must work out how best to harbour the possibilities of digital tools, while acknowledging and learning from the difficulties and consequences.

Recension av Sune Fahlgreen, Joel Halldorf, Erik Sidenvall & CeciliaWejryd (red.), Ostädade väckelser: Modernitetens förtrupper (Göteborg&Stockholm: Makadam förlag, 2023), 327 s. isbn 978-91-7061-450-7. Inbunden. 

This article proposes a Nordic GIS-based framework and platform for the digital registration and visualisation of places of worship and discusses how such a research infrastructure can be built to aid research on the spatial and temporal dimensions of religion in the Nordic countries, initially limited to Christian places of worship. The platform is scalable and can include other geographical areas or layers of information in the future. The data will be open for others to reuse and combine with additional datasets. The article presents the current data available from four Nordic countries and discusses methods of retrieving, vetting, and coordinating this data. The article then suggests a framework based on registering at least 13 fields of information at each place of worship and proposes a common taxonomy of religious affiliation facilitating research across borders. Combining spatial and temporal data with multi-level data on religious affiliations will open new possibilities for further research on the ebb and flow of religious movements in the Nordic countries.