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ABSTRACT
Online human relationships can exacerbate some of the worst of our tendencies toward each other, including deception, selfishness, apathy and disembodiment, and sexual harassment. Yet Christians can also bring their prayer practices online, as ways of bringing God’s new creation (known in Christian tradition as the Eighth Day) to the forefront. Through examination of three distinctive online prayer practices, combined with discussion of liturgical and sacramental theologies, this article shows that prayer online also holds out possibilities of reconciliation and justice as potential responses to negative human relationship tendencies.
Acknowledgements
This paper contains part of a revised lecture given at Durham University, “Key Issues in Digital Theology – Sacraments and Liturgy” (20 April 2018). Many thanks to CODEC, Peter Phillips, and Tim Hutchins for the invitation and hospitality. My thanks as well to Patrick Flanagan and Stephen Okey for reading and commenting on previous versions of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Dr Jana M. Bennett is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Dayton. Her research focus is on how to foster human relationships in the church. Her latest book, Singleness and the Church: A New Theology of the Single Life (Oxford, 2017), suggests ways that a variety of single people, from never married to widowed to divorced offer gifts to the church by their lives. She also writes about disability, technology, and moral formation.
Notes
1. Augustine, “Letter 55,” chapter 9.
2. Wirzba, The Paradise of God, chapter 5.
3. See, for example, Lena Chapin’s account of communion between the US and Mexico in “Communion at the Border.”
4. A classic account is Phillips, “Liturgy and Ethics.” See also Lysaught, “Eucharist as Basic Training,” 257–86.
5. Nabi et al., “Facebook Friends with (Health) Benefits,” 721–7.
6. Rosen, iDisorder, 3.
7. Rosen, iDisorder, 9.
8. Rosen, iDisorder, chapter two.
9. Turkle, Alone Together, 294. See also Carr, The Shallows, for a description of the move to self-referential aspects.
10. Pew, “Online Harassment.” Experiences and Attitudes section. However, men reported harassment in greater numbers over politics.
11. Powell and Henry, Sexual Violence in a Digital Age, 299.
12. The study only focused on Facebook use. Clayton et al., “Cheating, Breakup and Divorce,” 717–20.
13. See Brown et al, “Technology-Based Abuse,” 209–28.
14. Forbes, “Authentic Friendship,” 169. The authors cite Christofides et al., “Information disclosure and control,” 341–5.
15. See Granville, “Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.”
16. Bail et al., “Exposure to Opposing Views.”
17. Bense, “How Politics in Trump’s America.”
18. Powell and Henry, Sexual Violence in a Digital Age, 302.
19. Ibid., 303.
20. Cooper-Chrismon, “I Gave Up Social Media.”
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Wood, “Albert Borgmann on Taming Technology.”
24. Waters, Christian Moral Theology in the Emerging Technoculture, chapter 4.
25. Gaillardetz, Transforming Our Days, 124.
26. Ibid., 130.
27. Gaillardetz, Transforming Our Days, 131.
28. For example, the liturgy of the hours spoken online at sites like universalis.com or divineoffice.org.
29. The methodology in this paper is one I first developed in Bennett, Aquinas on the Web?, chs 4 and 5, where I began considering how online and offline versions of church converse with each other. See chs 4 and 5, especially pp. 137–9. See also Bennett, “The Grammar and Technology of Online Eucharist,” where I first explored using Herbert McCabe, David Power, and Louis Marie Chauvet to discuss digital sacramental life.
32. Catholic Hierarchies of Australia, England, and Wales, Ireland, “General Instruction on the Liturgy of the Hours,” paragraph 12.
33. Power, Sacrament, 51.
34. Ibid., 312.
35. As Doug Estes has noted, there are other ways of offering communion online, including online avatar worship leaders offering online avatar communion elements. See Estes, SimChurch.
36. It should be noted that virtual communion is not allowable in the current general stance taken by the United Methodist Church.
37. Bauerlein, “Church’s Online Communion.”
38. Comments, http://www.savior.org/testimonials.
39. Berger, @Worship, 18.
40. Schmidt, Virtual Communion, 71–2.
41. Ibid., 135–40.
42. Schmidt, Virtual Communion, especially chapter four.
43. Bennett, “The Grammar and Technology of Online Eucharist: A Conversation with Louis Marie Chauvet, David Power, and Herbert McCabe,” 11.
44. Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 326.
45. Bennett, Aquinas on the Web?, chapter 6.
46. See, Colón-Emeric, “A Wesleyan Perspective in Online Communion.”
47. Teresa Berger suggests that the popular pious devotions like praying the rosary or Eucharistic adoration that declined in the aftermath of Vatican II now find themselves somewhat revitalized in the contemporary internet era. Indeed, Berger argues, because of the increasing popularity of Eucharistic adoration online, Catholics need to think seriously about cyber-communion and cannot simply ignore the question as one too silly or insignificant to contemplate. See Berger, “Exploring Liturgical Practices in Cyberspace,” 281–3.
48. Schapiro, “GOP Presidential candidates offer prayers.”
49. “How You Can Really Help a Person,” first paragraph.
50. McCabe, God Matters, 174.
51. Ibid., 176.
52. Ibid., 177–8.
53. Ibid., 174.
54. Vatican News, “#PopeFrancis calls on Christians.”
55. British Carmelites, Tweet, 22 January 2019.
56. McCabe, God Matters, 178.
57. Multiple examples come to mind; clergy sexual abuse, covered up by supposedly Christian leaders of communities is one. Another is the ways that sacraments like baptism and Eucharist might reinforce racist ideologies. See Grimes, “Breaking the Body of Christ.”
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