A
brouhaha of sorts has developed over Jonathan Last's article in First Things about
religious bloggers. I'm really, really late to the party, but what the hey. My comments in brackets.
God on the Internet
Jonathan V. Last
Copyright (c) 2005 First Things 158 (December 2005): 34-40.
Even diligent students of the papacy may be unfamiliar with the pontificates of Michael and Pius XIII. Pope Michael, born David Bawden, was crowned on July 16, 1990. He has spent his papacy mostly at home, in Delia, Kansas, where he writes self-published books such as Imposter Popes and Idol Altars. Pope Pius XIII, born Earl Pulvermacher, was elevated on October 24, 1998, and currently takes Springdale, Washington, as his seat. Both popes appear in traditional papal vestments, both trace the origins of their particular schisms to the misdoings of John XXIII, and both—ah, yes—maintain websites from which they carry out their ministries...
[snip]
In a simpler time, these two men might have been town eccentrics, doing no more than attracting the snickers of their neighbors. Today, thanks to the vast wiring of the world, their pages have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, by onlookers from around the globe.
[Point to Last. Error, looniness, and even outright evil have a bigger stage in the Internet than they have ever had. Information overload - there's just too much out there, so what can possibly be significant? - is a corollary danger.]
One hundred and twenty-eight million Americans use the web, and it has been integrated, if only as a formality, into nearly every facet of modern life. Law firms, politicians, manufacturers, charities, elementary schools—one is hard-pressed to find an entity without a web appendage.
This is true even—or perhaps the word is, particularly—for religious life. According to a 2004 Pew survey, 64 percent of Internet-using Americans—82 million people—say they use the web for religious purposes. They are more likely to be female, white, middle aged, and college educated. Catholics and Jews tend to use the Internet slightly more heavily than Protestants. Half of these users report that they attend church at least once a week.
[snip]
Meanwhile, there are all the endlessly proliferating weblogs. The first blogs appeared in 1999. By 2004 there were estimated to be some 4 million of them. Today the number is closer to 8 million. John Mark Reynolds, a philosophy professor at Biola University who organized, this past October, the first religious blogger convention, GodblogCon, says that there are “literally millions” of religious bloggers, but that “if you’re talking about people who write for folk other than their immediate church family and their immediate community, there are a couple of thousand serious Godblogs.” It is a sign of the metastasizing of blogs that within a few months of the announcement of the convention, the GodblogCon website already had two blogs about the upcoming event.
Unlike the big corporate sites, Godblogs have smaller readerships, ranging anywhere from Fructus Ventris, a blog run by a midwife, which gets about 115 page-views a day, to Amy Welborn’s Open Book, which gets nearly twelve thousand. (In the world of Godblogs, more than two thousand page-views a day makes you a fairly heavy hitter.)
And then there are actual houses of worship. From Episcopal Grace Church in The Plains, Virginia, which serves 400 parishioners, to Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, an evangelical mega-church with 8,000 members, nearly every American church has its own webpage. Some are merely static placeholders with service times and driving directions; some are fully-interactive online communities where members can download audio files of sermons, order books, and even submit prayer requests.
[There's that term - "online community." Remember that.]
On this score, Protestant churches are, in general, more advanced and ambitious than Catholic parishes. The notable exception is the Vatican’s enormous, trench-deep site. Constructed in six languages, the Holy See’s offering is the single most impressive religious undertaking on the web. Part tourist information booth, part Great Library, Vatican.va provides searchable access to important documents as well as information about nearly every aspect of the Church. When John Paul II first began failing last March, Vatican.va published his email address. He received over twenty-thousand well-wishing emails in a thirty-six-hour period.
This electronic outpouring of affection for the pope was fitting, since he had been something of an early proponent of the Internet. At the World Communications Day in 1990, John Paul II said the Church must use “the full potential of the ‘computer age’”—this, at a time when the Internet barely existed. Two years later the Pontifical Council for Social Relations issued Aetatis Novae on the twentieth anniversary of Communio et Progressio, and while the document didn’t mention the Internet specifically, it defined communication as an act of “giving of self in love.” Insisting the Church must “communicate its message in a manner suited to each age,” Aetatis Novae called emerging communication technologies “a marvelous expression of human genius” which would be “essential in evangelization and catechesis.”
The capstone of the Vatican’s endorsement of the Internet was John Paul II’s apostolic letter about the New Media in January 2005. “New technologies,” he wrote, “create further opportunities for communication understood as a service to the pastoral government and organization. . . . One clear example today is how the Internet not only provides resources for more information, but habituates persons to interactive communication.” The pope warned that without proper formation, the Internet ran “the risk of manipulating and heavily conditioning, rather than serving people,” yet he concluded, with his typically joyous faith, “Do not be afraid!”
[And there's the thing in a nutshell - thank you, JPII. The web shares info and does create community of a sort, since it allows the interaction of persons. But there's a danger - that "conditioning" of which he warns. The web can become a world unto itself.]
Some websites bear out the Holy Father’s highest hopes. CatholicFind.com is a simple and elegant search engine for the teachings of the Church. Catholic-Hierarchy.org gives readers an almanac-style view of the Church’s structure. CardinalRating.com allows readers to research the views and writings of members of the College of Cardinals. Meanwhile, Catholic.org provides biographies of over seven thousand saints, together with explanations of the Sacraments, the Rosary, Lent, and other aspects of the faith. One of its sister sites, the Oremus Network, hosts a prayer circle that recruits people to commit to daily prayer.
[snip]
And then there are the blogs. If sites like Catholic.org hold out the promise of becoming the new archives and compendiums, Godbloggers could, in the best of worlds, become the new apologists. Godbloggers hail from all walks of life, from professional writers such as Domenico Bettinelli, Eve Tushnet, and Dawn Eden to laymen with day jobs: Emily Peterson and Annie Banno, for instance, at the blog After Abortion, or Marc, a UNIX administrator, who runs the blog Thickness.
Many in consecrated life run blogs, too. There is a fairly large ring of seminarian blogs, such as Christopher Decker’s Road to Emmaus, Dennis at Vita Mea, and Jeff Geerling’s Matthew 12:37.
Priests have gotten in on blogging, too. Father Bryce Sibley’s influential (although now dormant) blog, A Saintly Salmagundi, grew out of a bulletin board he kept as a seminarian in Rome in 1997. Sibley would clip articles from the Catholic Reporter or Modern Liturgy and tack them to his board, inviting comment from passers by. It became so popular among his fellow seminarians that once he became a priest stationed in Parks, Louisiana, he decided to start his blog as a virtual version of the bulletin board. “It began as a tool for laughing at things and goofing around,” he says, “which it still is, but it became a very powerful evangelical tool.”
Sibley recognizes potential pitfalls, particularly the “vapid spirituality of the web.” [Ouch, but yeah.] And he notes that in cyberspace, “Everyone can be their own magisterium”—a point the existence of Popes Michael and Pius XIII would seem to demonstrate. [This is not a function of cyberspace. Rather, if a person is his or her own magisterium, then cyperspace simply makes that manifest to others who might not have otherwise known. There's a difference.] Even so, Sibley believes, the good outweighs the bad. “There’s so much nuttiness—maybe in their own parish,” he explains. [Bingo.] “Or maybe there’s a lack of guidance. And so people can come to the Internet and they can come to blogs to find out the truth about what’s going on. And they can find answers to their faith.” As an instance, Sibley points to recent emails from a woman who converted to Catholicism and two men who have been inspired to the priesthood: All three said that the blog world played some part in their decision.
The growth of priest blogs has been slow but steady. In 2002, when Sibley started blogging, there were only five or six. Today the number is closer to fifty. Most of them are small, personal affairs. Started in August of 2004, Diary of a Suburban Priest is run by “Father Ethan” and gets about two hundred page-views a day. And then there’s Father Robert Johansen’s Thrown Back. A parish priest in St. Joseph, Michigan, Johansen was ordained in August 2001 and began blogging less than a year later. Like Sibley, Johansen sees the blog as “a good way to get the teachings of the Church out there.” “I have found it to be a real extension of my priestly ministry,” he explains. “Blogging is something that’s been fed by my priestly ministry,” Johansen says. “I blog frequently about things I encounter in my priestly ministry and it actually works vice versa as well. My blogging, and what I come to understand or learn from that, comes out in my preaching and my interaction with parishioners.”
Each of these bloggers commands a tiny audience, between a few dozen and a few thousand visitors a day. But taken together the bloggers wield disproportionate power in the virtual world, through what Hugh Hewitt, author of the book Blog, calls a “blog swarm.” Take, for example, the death of Terri Schiavo. Father Johansen was a long-time follower of the case, and he blogged about it often. On the strength of his blogging, he wrote a lengthy piece for National Review Online that chronicled the issue. Amy Welborn and others blogged about Johansen’s article. Eventually, his writing became part of the reportorial foundation for the movement which emerged to oppose Schiavo’s execution and had more impact than any of the statements issued by American bishops or cardinals.
All these blogs share two distinguishing characteristics: They’re Catholic, and they’re conservative. As the GodblogCon organizer John Mark Reynolds explains, “Most Godblogs in the United States are going to end up being Roman Catholic because most people who are Christian in the United States, in the Nicene Christian sense, are Roman Catholic. . . . And taken as a whole in our culture, it has been harder for traditional theists to get a microphone than for secularists—at least in print. So blogging has been, by and large, better for the right religiously than for the left.” Or, as Father Sibley puts it, “Orthodox blogs get more readership just as Rush Limbaugh gets more listeners than Air America does.”
[Another reason I've heard put out there - the liberals have control of the parish councils, the brick and mortar stuff, so the conservatives have taken to the web. The analogy, I suppose, would be Rush Limbaugh on the radio vs. network news (no, I don't know enough about it to get into the whole "liberal media bias" issue.)]
But the left has its own web presence. Father Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation makes good use of the Internet at CAC Radical Grace, with online bookstores, an electronic version of the center’s Meditation Garden, and even a section of Rohr’s thoughts that functions like a blog. Mel White’s SoulForce, a group dedicated to stopping “spiritual violence” against homosexuals, also has a sophisticated website, as do the Paulists with Busted Halo.
Busted Halo calls itself a site for “seekers,” meaning those interested in finding a spiritual home. But more often than not it is simply a clearinghouse for leftist discontent. After Ronald Reagan died, the site’s director emeritus, Father Brett Hoover, wrote,
[snip]
About the election of Benedict XVI, Busted Halo’s managing editor, Mike Hayes, wrote: “As the Papal conclave closed, fear crept into my heart. ‘Anybody but Ratzinger,’ I prayed. Moments before the announcement of who was to succeed Pope John Paul II, I even said to myself, ‘If it’s Ratzinger, I’m becoming an Episcopalian.’” Unlike the websites of Popes Michael and Pius XIII, Busted Halo carries the official seal of an actual Church-sanctioned society, which might leave some seekers confused. Blogger Amy Welborn says the Internet gives seekers the opportunity to “quietly observe the church or the faith; it’s like sneaking into the back pew of a church.” The problem is that in the virtual church of the web, the hymnal one finds in the back pew may be quite different from the hymnal in the front pew.
[Yeah, but it's not like this confusion wouldn't be out there without the Internet. The MSM goes regularly to McBrien and Reese and other "liberal" Catholics, and there are plenty of Catholics who don't think they give a perfectly accurate representation of the faith to the world. This is my general beef with Last's piece - he seems to find problems which are hardly unique to the web.]
There are other troubling features of the web. It lends itself easily to politicization—as Father Hoover demonstrated with his “Good Riddance to Reagan” essay. Your Catholic Voice is a political action group devoted to “shaping” the government, “from the County Courthouse to the halls of Congress.” The website Priests for Life is similarly engaged in the nuts-and-bolts of political action. And occasionally serious people like Father Sibley are also sucked down by the allure of the Internet’s political reductionism. On March 4, 2005 he blogged: “This morning I went to visit the fourth grade class at the local Catholic Grade School to allow them to ask me questions. During our little session one child asked me, ‘Father, why can’t kids at public schools pray in class?’ I realized that this was a perfect moment for evangelization, so I walked to the chalkboard and told the kids that I would answer the question and teach them a new word. So I wrote in capital letters on the chalkboard: L-I-B-E-R-A-L-S.”
[I'm not sure why this is so troubling to Last. The Internet is a medium for communication. Newspaper Op-Ed pages lend themselves easily to politicization as well. And if organizations dedicated to political action use the web as a means to distribute their message, how is this different from direct mailings or ads? What Father Silbey did was not a surrender to the Internet's political reductionism - what he did was express a personal view in a school classroom, then report the event on the Internet. If there was political reductionism, it took place in the real world, not the virtual one.]
Another reason for the tyranny of the banal is the web’s general disposition toward consumerism. The Internet is filled with stores and businesses designed to siphon money from the faithful. There’s CatholicStore.com and the Discount Catholic Store and Catholic Supply (your source for GiggleWings® guardian angel dolls). Protestants have an array of shopping options, too. From Biblical Expressions to ShoppersForJesus.com , every conceivable bit of religious schmaltz is available online for immediate shipping. At Biblical-Gifts.com you can find a 24-carat-gold cross with a vial of water from the Jordan River. At Abbey Trade you can get “Blessings in a Bottle”—small inspirational messages stored in decorative bottles. At the Heavenly Hut you can buy Christian nightlights. Kerusso.com (company motto: “Innovation That Inspires”) offers Jesus poker chips—because “Jesus went all in for you!”
[Again - different how from catalogs or ads in magazines or ads in newspapers or ads on TV or ads on radio? Yeah, there's a lot of cheap crap out there. Some of it is for sale on the web. Consumerism and media go hand in hand, sadly.]
A more personal strain of consumerism leads people such as Stephen Ray to hawk their wares on the web. Ray, the author of several religious books, runs a website called Defenders of the Catholic Faith. On it he features a photo album of his family and his travels, conversion testimonials from readers, and even his own blog. But the primary mission of Defenders of the Catholic Faith is to move product. Books, audio tapes, videos, DVDs—it’s all there, mingled with explanations of “Why I’m Catholic” and lessons about St. Mark. There’s also a press kit describing Ray, showing his upcoming speaking schedule, and telling you how to book him at your event for a mere $600, plus expenses. (That’s for local talks; overnight events are $1,800, plus expenses and, as his site explains, “Steve rarely travels without his wife Janet.”)
[Again, I'm mystified by Last's seeming objection to this. The regular channels are clogged. If you've got a product to sell and you can't get it into stores, the net is the best way to get it out there - the most efficient means for marketing your product. Beats the hell out of door-to-door sales. Especially true if what you're selling is yourself - your message, your speaking, your books. You're your own best salesman - check out MJ Rose's Buzz, Balls & Hype for how this is true in the secular book world. If your books happen to be about religion or God, why does that make a difference? So my objection here is that Last's charge has nothing to do with God on the Internet per se.]
Dating services are trying to cash in on religion, too, whether it’s Catholic Singles, JDate (“the largest Jewish singles network”), dharmaMatch (“where spiritual singles meet”), or Spirit Personals, a site with every possible permutation, from Christian, to Jewish, to lesbian matches: “SpiritGayandLesbianSingles promotes personal and spiritual growth, while encouraging a healthy lifestyle. Whether you’re interested in a sexy, traditional relationship or fun alternative online dating, we have what you need. Join now to enjoy your free membership!”
If you meet the partner of your dreams online, get married, and find things rocky, the web can help there, too. ExceptionalMarriages.com offers counseling and aid in the form of quizzes designed to test the health of your marriage, an advice blog, tele-counseling services, and a store with enough books, videos, and trinkets to fix any relationship, traditional or alternative. Think of it as the virtual mall for spirituality: Shopping, entertainment, and socializing—everything the faithful soul needs for earthly comfort, all marketed with the shiny gloss of religious morality.
[Last's objection seems to be laid out clearly here - the mixing of stuff for sale and spirituality. I have mixed feelings about online dating services - there, person-to-person contact seems to matter more, somehow, though I can't make a serious case against it. But there are a number of religious presses selling books to enhance folks' spiritual lives - what's wrong with them? I can buy really nice icons online, too - how is that a problem? Why would it be better to go to a store, or order a catalog? Ah, but what about entertainment and socializing? Fair enough. But one objection at a time. Selling stuff online is not a crime, even if it's God-stuff.]
Nowhere is the shape of modern religion better displayed than at Beliefnet, the ur-religious destination on the Internet.
[I'm cutting the long section on Beliefnet, but that's not to say it's not good. Go to the First Things website for the article in toto (and without my buzzing about).]
Beliefnet also offers its own blogs, as well as a blog of blogs, called BlogHeaven, “where faith blogs go if they’re good.” And there’s loads of interactivity, from message boards to chat rooms to comment bars. “The user can customize their experience so much that it can be kind of a vertical experience or a horizontal experience,” Waldman explains, “depending on who you are at that moment.”
Waldman takes an ad-executive’s approach toward religion. “The Internet certainly makes it a wide-open marketplace, but the existing brands will have an advantage,” he says.
There’s been this move toward the creation of a religious marketplace. The Internet accelerates that. You can’t count on the propagation of your faith just from the fact that your parents were of a certain faith and they’re going to pass it down to their kids, because people are just exposed to too many other ideas and faiths now, so the faiths—the religions—have to understand that they’re competing. . . . People now view themselves a little bit as spiritual consumers, and they’re getting stuff from all over the place—books, music, TV shows, movies—and I’m not saying if it’s good or bad, that’s just the world we’re in now. And the Internet is a key player in accelerating that and probably accentuating both the positive and negative aspects of that trend: The negative being the kind of dilettante-ish surfing for designer religions. . . . But on the other hand a lot of people, through the Internet, have found a serious faith connection that’s really brought them closer to God and improved their lives.
[Now we're getting at that real problem of information overload. Kudos to Last.]
[snip]
Which should worry us all—for perceived needs aren’t always the same thing as genuine needs, and answers to bad questions can turn into very, very bad answers. Something is happening at the intersection of religion and the Internet that is like the old denominalization of American sects raised to a new and frightening power. On the Internet, those dissatisfied with what they find in their religious brick-and-mortar communities can simply retreat into a virtual world in which they are surrounded entirely by like-minded people.
[Now we're getting somewhere, sort of. Surrounding yourself with entirely like-minded people is a real danger. Though again, it's hardly unique to the Internet. Subscribing to the Nation or National Review is similar, no? A person might be better off subscribing to both. Happily, there are multiple blogs out there, and they're free! But more to the point - check out the comments boards at Mark Shea. Hardly a community of entirely like-minded people. Or Amy Welborn's boxes. Granted, there's a lot of agreeing, but there's also a lot of robust - even heated - debate. It's what you make it.]
Dissatisfied with Cardinal McCarrick’s wishy-washiness on pro-abortion Catholic politicians? Blogger Domenico Bettinelli sounds off about it so you can take comfort at his site. Unhappy with the liberal rector of your own parish? Find a conservative priest online to whom you can turn. It’s happening all the time. As Father Johansen tells it, “I get pretty regular emails from people asking me for advice on this issue or that, frequently because they feel that they can’t rely on the priests in their own area, unfortunately, so they read my blog and they decide, ‘Well, Fr. Rob is somebody I think I can rely on and I’ll ask what he thinks.’”
“The world is breaking up,” the mad poet Robert Bly once intoned, “into small communities of the saved.” These communities have resulted in the rise of what is known on the web as “Saint Blog’s Parish,” a ring of 758 websites where compatible Catholic bloggers can join forces to establish their own small group. Nearly every blogger links to similar bloggers, who link on to other bloggers, who all link back to the first site, until the circle closes and something emerges that does, in fact, look like a community. And yet, it is a community based on like-mindedness and tied together by remote interaction—which makes for a very strange community, indeed.
[It's the remote interaction thing that's really bugging Last, I suspect. After all, everyone at Mass professes the same Creed. Are we just surrounding ourselves with like-minded people in our faith community? Is that so terrible?]
Another concern is how the Internet is demystifying religion. One of Joseph de Maistre’s pet theories was that the authority of the Church depended in large part on mystery. Blogger Mickey Kaus recently wondered if the notion of mysterious silence on the part of religious institutions has become outmoded: “If you were a respected authority you used to be able to get away with maintaining a meaningful silence. Now you’ve got to be blogging in your own ‘unique voice’ about every little thing that comes up, or else some ambitious lesser authority who posts more frequently will steal your flock.”
[Can't really speak to this one. Don't know if what Kaus says is really a concern. Yeah, I'll read a more frequently updated blog more often than a less-frequently updated blog. But I'm not about to change faiths because of it.]
Beliefnet’s founder Steve Waldman speaks reverently of this new transparency. “We’re now in a world where the majority of people live in democratic countries,” he says. “People haven’t grappled fully with what the implications of that are for religion. . . . People in the suburbs go to their PTA meetings and ask their principal for the budget, and they get it. . . . They ask for information about their health plan, and they get it. Transparency is all around them, and so it would just seem natural to demand that of your church. The more democracy is everywhere, the more people may, for better or for worse, attempt to demand things of religious leaders. The Internet is part of that story.”
[I think the Church could stand a little more transparency. But that's just me.]
Of course, it’s one thing to want to know your church’s budget, and quite another thing to want to know why Mass is taking so long. Last March the priest-blogger Father Ethan ran a post asking, “A good priest friend of mine . . . wants to know about Mass lengths. He says, ‘All things being equal, (as much as is possible to imagine) at what point do people feel short-changed, and at what point do they feel Father needs to move things along.’”
[This is an honest pastoral question; not sure what the problem is. He's trying to fit the form to the matter, no?]
Whether or not authority suffers from the disappearance of mystery, certainly the power of ritual is diminished by having every conversation in the sacristy broadcast for public consumption.
[Who exactly is advocating that every conversation in teh sacristy be broadcast for public consumption?]
The next stop may be the digitizing of religious practice. Online confessions have been around at least since 1997, and although the Catholic Church has rejected the practice, that hasn’t closed down all the virtual confessionals. At Absolution-Online.com, for instance, you can enter the virtual booth, select your sins from five general classes of misdoing, and then proceed to the automated confessor, which doles out punishments normally consisting of some combination of fasting, Our Fathers, and Hail Marys. Although there is a disclaimer saying that the e-confessional isn’t sanctioned by the Catholic Church, most of its language is taken from the sacramental texts. Absolution-Online.com is also one of several sites that offers a virtual rosary. The website Universalis does an online version of the Liturgy of the Hours. Elsewhere there are cyber Seders and even Internet muftis.
[Okay, now this is just silly. Worth noting, though, if you're arguing that people are haunted, that they want the confessional even if they're not willing to get to the box.]
Beliefnet’s Waldman thinks that this distancing of the self from the religious act can be helpful. “The anonymity of the Internet is what makes it work so well for religion,” he says. “It’s the flip side of why porn spreads. The same phenomenon that has led to pornography spreading, a variant of that has made religion one of the most popular topics online. It’s that you can explore religious matters in the privacy of your own home; ask questions you might be embarrassed to ask; have conversations with people with some anonymity; and do it anytime day or night.” This “anonymity combined with intimacy,” Waldman says, makes people “more inclined to open up,” since they aren’t revealing themselves totally.
To which one wants to say: Doesn’t that metaphor give you pause? Is a technique that has made pornography into the Internet’s number-one business really a good idea for religion, the Internet’s number-two business?
[Well, maybe. It is a pause-giving metaphor. But both porn and religion are intensely private affairs to some extent. Public worship is important, but prayer goes on behind closed doors...]
The failure of anonymous online pornography to be real sex is also the failure of anonymous online churching to be real religion: In both sex and religion, incarnation—the physical body—turns out to matter a great deal.
[When did we talk about online churching, again? Nobody's putting the Mass online, are they? It's a medium for information and communication. There's a real objection to be made about online Adoration, I think, and the online confessional is almost a gag - Last notes that it's not sanctioned. And once again - porn isn't real sex whether it's online or in a magazine. This problem is not unique to the Internet.]
Back in February 2002, Archbishop John Foley, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, released two documents: The Church and the Internet and Ethics in Internet. “The Church and the Internet” is a perceptive survey of the promises and dangers of the medium. Foley recognized that there are “benefits more or less peculiar to the Internet” in terms of geographical and temporal access to information and warned that “hanging back timidly from fear of technology or for some other reason is not acceptable” to the Church. And yet, he observed, “already, the two-way interactivity of the Internet is blurring the old distinction between those who communicate and those who receive what is communicated.” He also warned that aside from the obvious evils of luring users to pornography and drawing them into fetid hatreds, the Internet also carries the danger of fostering “consumerism” and “pathological isolation.”
[Fair enough.]
“Ethics in Internet” explored these concerns more fully: “It takes no great stretch of the imagination to envisage the earth as an interconnected globe humming with electronic transmissions—a chattering planet nestled in the provident silence of space.” The web “lends itself equally well to active participation and to passive absorption. . . . It can be used to break down the isolation of individuals and groups or to deepen it.”
Later in the document, Foley moaned, in the approved Al Gore style of those days, about “digital divide,” “cultural imperialism,” and “transnational corporations.” But he did understand something about the dangers of weakened incarnation. “Virtual reality is no substitute for the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the sacramental reality of the other sacraments, and shared worship in a flesh-and-blood community,” he wrote. “There are no sacraments on the Internet; and even the religious experiences possible there by the grace of God are insufficient apart from real-world interaction with other persons of faith.”
[Absolutely.]
Father Johansen adds that “Where we encounter mystery primarily is in the liturgy, in prayer. . . . The Internet can’t replace those things.” To their credit, many of the Godbloggers understand this, too. That’s why they convened in California last October to see, touch, and talk to one another at the Godblog convention. As Professor Reynolds explains: “Kneeling, on a kneeler made of oak, in front of a priest with trembling hands handing you the very Body and Blood of Christ which you taste and touch and smell is different than mouse-clicking your way through reality. . . . Is [the Internet] real fellowship? No, I don’t think so. I view it more as co-laboring.”
[Shouldn't the question be, "Is the Internet real worship?" It sounds like that's what he's describing. Fellowship seems much more likely.]
A tool for co-laboring. That’s the most we might hope for. And in the days of Pope Pius XIII and ceaseless politicking and Spiritual Weightloss, even that much seems a pipe dream. The great blessing of the Internet is that it lets people find each other. Of course, this is the great curse of the Internet as well—for not only can model-train collectors share their joint enthusiasm, but so can anti-Semites, child molesters, and gang members. But even at its best, the Internet is a weakening of reality, and with its consumer satisfactions, politicizing impulses, and substitutions for the body, it constantly lures us up into thinner and thinner air. Isn’t religion supposed to enrich the world around us instead? Shut off your computer. Take a deep breath. Go to church.
[See, I'll stay with him on the "thinner and thinner air" bit. Emails are useful, but letters are better. And I no longer write many letters. Too busy emailing and blogging... He's getting at something real, but there was a lot in the piece that seemed off-target. Says me. Now go click on the book button at the top of this page and buy my book from Amazon, but not before leaving a like-minded comment!]
Jonathan V. Last is online editor of the Weekly Standard.
