Carlos Nazario Mora Duro He holds a Ph.D. in Social Sciences from El Colegio de México. He has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and at the University of Leipzig. He is currently a research associate and lecturer at the University of Tübingen in Germany. His main areas of interest are the sociology of religion, narratives of migration and integration, and the use of information technologies and social media. In his doctoral dissertation, he analyzed the relevance of secularization in Mexico through a qualitative approach focusing on people without religious affiliation in urban and rural-indigenous contexts.

Temáticas

“Thanks to the Virgin”: Online Votive Offerings and Digital Religion in the Baroque Era

  • Carlos Nazario Mora Duro

This article analyzes online votive offerings as a phenomenon of digital religion, in which the sacred is transferred and adapted to the virtual realm to participate in online user conversations. Virtual altarpieces manifest as forms of entertainment, self-representation, mockery, and social criticism, which emphasizes their communicative nature, their status as both individual and collective documents, as well as their popular and potentially transgressive orientation. This transgression is not limited to popular participation but also points to a devotional shift toward a secular reinterpretation of religious images. The analysis draws on Baroque modernity, emphasizing the adaptive and subversive reinvention of cultural symbols, as well as the notion of lived religion, to understand how the religious and the everyday intertwine in the digital context.