For many months the Internet address www.watchtower.org featured a blank white page. Then, suddenly in mid-January, 1997, the blank page was replaced with an "Official Web Site of Jehovah's Witnesses."

A professional-looking job, the multi-page Watchtower website features illustrated online versions of several 32-page brochures, including What Does God Require of Us?, Jehovah's Witnesses in the Twentieth Century, The Divine Name That Will Endure Forever, and Should You Believe in the Trinity? Also, half-a-dozen tracts and a dozen recent Watchtower and Awake! articles.

Prominently featured is a large section of the site devoted to "Medical Care and Blood." This includes the complete brochure How Can Blood Save Your Life? a couple of favorable articles from medical journals, and several recent Watchtower and Awake! articles on heart disease, cigarettes, dyslexia, sickle-cell anemia, and other topics.

Under "Languages" the website features pages for Spanish, French, German, Russian, Hindi, Japanese, and Chinese -- all unfinished and labeled "under construction," except for Spanish. Available on the Spanish portion of the website in colorful format are translations of the brochure What Does God Require of Us? and half-a-dozen other publications.

Other pages list numerous Watchtower publications available in printed form and the Society's branch office addresses. Notably absent is any e-mail address. The Society now owns three Internet domains: watchtower.org where the new website is located, watchtower.net with a simple greeting on an otherwise blank page, and WTBTS.org newly acquired in December 1996 and not yet operational, as of this writing. (The domain watchtower.com is owned by an apparently unrelated secular firm, Watchtower Inc., of Champaign, Illinois.) Warnings to JWs against the Internet notwithstanding, the Society seems to be gearing up for future expansion in cyberspace.

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