{"id":16774,"date":"2020-03-25T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-03-25T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2020\/03\/25\/how-the-internet-is-bringing-comfort-to-faith-communities-during-coronavirus-social-isolation\/"},"modified":"2020-03-25T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2020-03-25T12:00:00","slug":"how-the-internet-is-bringing-comfort-to-faith-communities-during-coronavirus-social-isolation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2020\/03\/25\/how-the-internet-is-bringing-comfort-to-faith-communities-during-coronavirus-social-isolation\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Internet is Bringing Comfort to Faith Communities during Coronavirus Social Isolation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.abc.net.au\/news\/2020-03-24\/hindu-christian-worship-in-the-time-of-covid-19-coronavirus\/12081284\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.abc.net.au\/news\/image\/12081488-3x2-700x467.jpg\" style=\"max-width:100%;object-fit:scale-down;\" \/><br \/>AUSTRALIA, March 23, 20202 (ABC National Radio): Hemangini Patel has been attending her temple every Sunday for as long as she can remember. As a devout Hindu, and member of Sydney&#8217;s Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS) community, the weekly &#8220;sabha&#8221; or congregation is a routine she looks forward to each week. But for the past two Sundays, the religious ritual has looked slightly different. Responding to the government&#8217;s restrictions on public gatherings to curb the spread of COVID-19, her local BAPS temple replaced the in-person assembly with a live stream.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Our regular Sunday assemblies tend to confabulate messages of hope, unity and fraternity, so to have those messages as a reminder of what our priorities are in these times, it really helps to keep everyone calm, says Patel.&#8221; According to Kunal Patel, BAPS&#8217;s national community relations volunteer, the first online assembly was live streamed to 4,500 devices across Australia and New Zealand. &#8220;We anticipate that there would&#8217;ve been one family per device, so if you take three people per family as conservative estimate, that&#8217;s 10 to 11,000 people that would have accessed the stream,&#8221; he says. &#8220;The most important feedback we received was that for practicing Hindus this is an important milestone, to attend a congregation on a weekly basis, and the fact it&#8217;s still accessible puts people at ease.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source AUSTRALIA, March 23, 20202 (ABC National Radio): Hemangini Patel has been attending her temple every Sunday for as long,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16774\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}