Facebook offers many a spiritual experience
Cathleen Falsani/Religion News Service
Issue date: 6/15/08 Section: Divine Intervention
Heidi Campbell, a professor of communications at Texas A&M University and author of "Exploring Religious Community Online: We Are One in the Network," has been researching spirituality and the Internet since 1996. I asked her about my spiritual Facebook experience and she said it's something she's seeing more and more.
"In a contemporary, information-based society, it's often hard to get that face-time connection," she said. "It becomes that virtual third place where I can kind of connect with that transcendent part of myself through conversation when I couldn't maybe take the time out to get to a church to have it."
Some of us in our peculiar Facebook community are members of churches. Others left the church not long after college and haven't returned. Most of us are still trying to live the faith. What I think we've begun to do, though none of us has named it such, is pastor one another.
We're all talking, but more important, we're all listening to each other in a way we wouldn't be able to do in person.
"The beauty of Facebook ... is that you're choosing your community," Campbell said. "Because it's a lot of like minds gathering or people with a similar background ... you can develop a sense of intimacy more quickly. Some criticize that because they say it's a false sense of intimacy and it's a false sense of community because it's these self-selecting, homogeneous, very tightly bound groups. But I think you could argue ... it's the way you connect with people now.
"As middle age is staring us in the face, we're trying to reconnect in a lot of ways. There's some part of that spirituality that traditional religion (doesn't) really connect with, but there's that meaning-making, that God void that I want to reconnect with, and so the Internet is becoming a great place, whether it's to explore or to meet other people who are on that search."
When you think of it that way, logging on takes on new meaning. Even cyberspace can be a sacred place.
Cathleen Falsani is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and author of "The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People."
"In a contemporary, information-based society, it's often hard to get that face-time connection," she said. "It becomes that virtual third place where I can kind of connect with that transcendent part of myself through conversation when I couldn't maybe take the time out to get to a church to have it."
Some of us in our peculiar Facebook community are members of churches. Others left the church not long after college and haven't returned. Most of us are still trying to live the faith. What I think we've begun to do, though none of us has named it such, is pastor one another.
We're all talking, but more important, we're all listening to each other in a way we wouldn't be able to do in person.
"The beauty of Facebook ... is that you're choosing your community," Campbell said. "Because it's a lot of like minds gathering or people with a similar background ... you can develop a sense of intimacy more quickly. Some criticize that because they say it's a false sense of intimacy and it's a false sense of community because it's these self-selecting, homogeneous, very tightly bound groups. But I think you could argue ... it's the way you connect with people now.
"As middle age is staring us in the face, we're trying to reconnect in a lot of ways. There's some part of that spirituality that traditional religion (doesn't) really connect with, but there's that meaning-making, that God void that I want to reconnect with, and so the Internet is becoming a great place, whether it's to explore or to meet other people who are on that search."
When you think of it that way, logging on takes on new meaning. Even cyberspace can be a sacred place.
Cathleen Falsani is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and author of "The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People."
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