Blockchain Papers

Mohammad Modabber Chaharborj

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Web3 ecosystems represent an emergent field of digital religion where decentralized infrastructures—spanning smart contracts, token economies, and symbolic interfaces—actively generate novel forms of ritual life. These rituals, deeply embedded in algorithmic processes and economic incentives, cultivate collective identities, symbolic hierarchies, and affective economies marked by hope and betrayal. To interpret these dynamics, this article proposes Distributed Rituals Analysis (DRA), a comprehensive framework synthesizing Lived Religion, Ritualization Theory, and Actor-Network Theory. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic engagement across diverse Web3 communities —including NFTs, DAOs, and staking protocols—I illustrate how decentralized practices become ritualized through temporal orchestration, symbolic differentiation, and distributed agency. Reflexive participation further reveals the researcher’s complex positionality as both observer and participant. DRA offers conceptual and methodological clarity for exploring emergent rituals in decentralized environments, illuminating how digital infrastructures reconfigure sacredness and collective meaning-making. This framework also lays the groundwork for future comparative inquiries into ritual forms across decentralized and hybrid spaces.

Bernard McGinn

On 10 March 2005, Professor Bernard McGinn delivered the William James Lecture on Religious Experience at the Harvard Divinity School. The founding bequest of this annual lectureship was made for the purpose of having an outstanding scholar or scholars lecture on some aspect of this subject, which received classic treatment in William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience . James's aim was not to defend religion by scientific proof, but to stake out his own position as a “piecemeal supernaturalist, one who admits miracles and providential leadings, and finds no intellectual difficulty in mixing the ideal and real worlds together” to locate where the “ideal region” interacts with “the real world's details” to cause experiences—prayer, epiphany, or visions—that generate faith.