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Tuesday, April 16, 2013 from 5:30-7:00 p.m., Humanities Room 150

The Department of Religious Studies and the Center for Media, Religion and Culture at the University of Colorado Boulder invite you to join us for an interactive presentation and talk on gaming and religion. This event brings together 2 prominent scholars  to talk about the history of religion and gaming, games as religious practice, and how today’s game technologies might intersect with new understandings of religion and spirituality.  

Speakers:

Jason Anthony: Senior editor at Time Inc., speaker, and game designer who works at the intersection of games and ritual. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Christian Century, the Boston Review, and The Record. Most of Anthony’s games take religious rituals as a starting point. Shabbat-put was a mashup of Jewish Sabbath rituals and Olympic events. In The Cards was a fully-gamed chapel service, commissioned by a seminary, based on the rules of blackjack. Sacrifice Play was a reinvention of the Aztec ball games, complete with human sacrifices. The Ten Year Game is a belief-agnostic, fully-gamed religion that takes ten years to play.

Rachel Wagner: Associate Professor of Religion in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Ithaca College. Rachel’s work centers on the study of religion and culture, including especially religion and film and religion and virtual reality. Her book, Godwired: Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality (Routledge, 2012) explores how our fascination with all things virtual reveals our desire for new rituals and new modes of world building. Short pieces relating to this research project can be found in Religion Dispatches and in the Society of Biblical Literature Forum.

The talk is free and open to the public.  All RLST faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates are warmly invited to attend.  

Please contact Deborah.Whitehead@colorado.edu  for more information.