Cases of sextortion have soared by 400 percent in some states in the last 18 months.

Targets and perpetrators

Young people are navigating a digital world where one in seven minors are asked for nudes by a stranger online on a weekly or even a daily basis.

This complex moral and social challenge demands our collective attention, because despite ongoing research and reports calling for urgent national action, public awareness remains low.

The vast majority of four-year-olds are using the internet in some capacity, according to research. By the time those children turn 11 years old, the majority of children are using it unsupervised.

A report in 2022 revealed that of all 9-12-year-olds, the majority (two out of three) interact with unfamiliar adults online. One in six children have had romantic or sexual conversations with an online-only contact.

There is no longer an ‘online' and ‘real' world dichotomy here; for young people online is the world in which they live, meet friends and navigate relationships.

Perpetrators of online sexual exploitation are accessing children through gaming, chat functions, video calls, dating apps, social media applications and other platforms.

Recent cases of sextortion in Australia are dispelling myths of grooming occurring over long periods of time, allowing for identification and intervention.

Instead, evidence reveals that grooming can take multiple forms (often involving the deception of posing as another young person), and the grooming process, including the solicitation of images, can occur over a matter of hours, often with devastating consequences.

At particular risk are young people in out-of-home care, who identify as LGBTIQ+, who have multicultural or Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander backgrounds, or who are living with a disability. Children from these cohorts are increasingly seeking connection via online platforms.

The notion of ‘stranger danger' is not effective here. In around 50-70 percent of cases of online child sexual abuse, the abuser is known to the child.

Research shows that adolescents who are known to the victim inflict the highest proportion of child sexual abuse, with adolescents in a romantic relationship close behind.

Nonconsensual sexting and/or distribution of self-generated images are increasingly associated with acrimonious adolescent relationships.

According to a 2022 report by the World Health Organisation, almost all the nonconsensual-distribution offenders against youth were themselves young people.

'Grooming can take multiple forms (often involving the deception of posing as another young person), and the grooming process, including the solicitation of images, can occur over a matter of hours, often with devastating consequences.'

Access to technology

Any conversation about increased unsupervised access to technology must address one key consequence: heightened exposure to pornographic content, whether stumbled upon innocently or sought out deliberately.

In Australia boys are, on average, aged 13 years at the time of their first exposure to pornography.

Exposure to pornography can strengthen attitudes supportive of sexual violence and violence against women and harmful sexual behaviour between adolescents.

A report from the eSafety Commissioner in 2023 revealed that young people described online pornography as an avenue to learn about sex.

Mitigating this problem from a schools standpoint faces numerous challenges, especially around consistency and quality of preventative education.

Myths and misconceptions that age-appropriate sexual health and safety education in schools ‘promotes' sex, and that sexual abuse is ‘happening elsewhere', continue to hamper the urgent discussion needed to increase sexual safety knowledge in Australian schools.

Providing sexual abuse evention programmes

The Victorian Child Safe Standards for education providers state that young people should be offered access to sexual abuse prevention programmes and to relevant information in an age-appropriate way.

There's a need to build our confidence and capacity to educate young people in this space.

At minimum, Australia needs a well-resourced, consistently implemented, and rigorous sexual health and safety education programme that builds upon the existing Respectful Relationships curriculum.

One such professional learning programme designed to meet these challenges is Power to Kids, from the MacKillop Institute, designed to strengthen prevention and responses to child sexual abuse, harmful sexual behaviour and dating violence for young people in residential care and school settings.

We often hear from schools of the need for deeper training for educators to build their knowledge and capacity to better prevent, identify and respond to indicators of abuse.

The long-standing gap in sex education is now impacting the confidence of the current generation of teachers who have been charged with the responsibility to teach the next generation.

Educators require the support of their school system leaders, parents and the wider school community to put that training into practice.

They need to have confidence that having sensitive and informed conversations with young people about sexual safety will be viewed as aligned with the duty of care to keep children safe and will not result in punitive action.

We also need to get better at fostering proactive conversations around ways to seek help.

A key strategy we teach through the Power to Kids programme is having ‘brave conversations' around sexual safety.

Aligned with the One Talk at a Time campaign, it is important that parents/carers and educators raise sexual safety topics proactively when opportunities arise, and ask questions or raise concerns when they notice possible indicators of abuse.

Creating safe environments

The Royal Commission confirmed that it can take over 20 years for a child to disclose sexual abuse.

Disclosures can be partial and nonlinear and are more likely to be made to a peer or sibling. This means that having proactive conversations can help establish safe environments for young people to come forward, ask questions or seek support when needed.

The other important reality for parents to grapple with is that their child may be the one causing harm. Creating safe environments for young people to share potentially problematic behaviours and have them addressed are just as critical.

A common anxiety among professionals working with young people is that addressing child sexual abuse is too daunting a problem.

There is a wide perception that the problem of child sexual abuse to ‘too big' or ‘too hard' to take action that will make a meaningful impact. This can lead to a sense of helplessness, being overwhelmed, which can lead to a lack of public engagement.

That lack of engagement has been a longstanding concern.

Research conducted by ACCCE in 2020 revealed that many parents, carers, and educators hold negative attitudes towards the topic, but this hinders their ability to implement effective prevention measures by ‘disassociation or limited engagement'.

To make things additionally complicated, victim-blaming is more likely in instances of online sexual abuse.

The ACCCE report revealed that 80 percent of parents/carers would respond with anger at their child if they found out they had shared images online, and 73 percent would be angry if their child spoke with strangers online.

‘Many participants reported that they would be more angry at their child in the instance of online child sexual exploitation than if the abuse happened in the offline world.

This was because they assumed their children should "know better" and could easily "just switch off" the device to protect themselves'. Some parents also reported they would not report or seek help due to shame and embarrassment of perceived ‘bad parenting'.

Despite these beliefs, 89 percent of parents believed their children would tell them if something happened to them online.

Ultimately, shame and stigma can still overshadow our desire to protect and believe our children.

Unchecked, our discomfort can prevent us from educating ourselves and our children, and prevent us from listening, believing and responding to children when they come forward.

What to do

To effectively address child sexual abuse, we need to foster a sense of shared responsibility among technology companies, corporations, financial institutions, law enforcement, schools, and therapeutic services.

Collaboration across all aspects of prevention and response is essential. Victim-survivors have highlighted the need for greater consistency in quality, trauma-informed practices, collaborative problem-solving, information sharing, and communication within the service system.

Additionally, it's important to acknowledge that our attitudes towards sexual abuse are often shaped by our personal experiences and education, which may include trauma.

It's crucial to acknowledge that many educators, parents, and carers may have experienced abuse themselves. Self-care is essential as we educate ourselves on this important issue.

A shift in public attitudes will require an investment in both prevention strategies and effective responses for victims of abuse.

That means developing proactive approaches that encourage open conversations with young people, encourage help-seeking, and foster safe environments for discussing sexual safety.

• First published in Eureka Street
• Smeeta Singh is National Programs Director Power to Kids, a professional learning programme within The MacKillop Institute that strengthens prevention and responses to child sexual abuse, harmful sexual behaviour and dating violence for young people in residential care and school settings.

New Zealand Customs Service, New Zealand Police and the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) work in partnership to identify child victims and target offenders involved in the online sexual abuse of children, in New Zealand and across the world.

The agencies are marking World Children's Day, by raising the alarm on children's rights and welfare.

Customs said advances in technology had led to more crimes being committed both in the real world and online, with offenders hiding their identities behind encryption and anonymising tools.

But it said the offending was against real children, who suffered serious sexual abuse. Read more

He believes the pattern is partly a reaction against the stigma toward religion in older generations, with gen Z now able to customise their belief systems in online spaces.

"For people who identify differently or who feel like they wouldn't belong normally, it's cool to see space carved out," he said.

He said there's still a yearning and hopefulness that we can remake institutions or traditions that suit who we are now in time. So yeah, a reclamation." Read more

God is trending]]> 164726 https://cathnews.co.nz/2023/04/03/pope-should-have-worn-his-new-coat/ Mon, 03 Apr 2023 07:59:58 +0000 https://cathnews.co.nz/?p=157491 Pope Francis was hospitalised in Rome last week with a respiratory infection. Yet according to the internet, the entire incident could've been avoided had he worn the AI-generated puffer coat that took the digital world by storm last week. With the Pope's illness happening shortly after the image was posted online, internet users quipped that Read more

The problem is that church leaders haven't grasped the power of cultural trends in technology, education and economics that are fueling sharp declines in statistics linked to dating, marriage and fertility, said Brian Willoughby of the Brigham Young University School of Family Life.

"The key word is ‘tension,'" he said. Among the Latter-day Saints, these numbers are "not falling as fast" as in other groups, "but our young people are feeling tensions between the patterns they see all around them and what they hear from their parents and religious leaders.

"We are seeing the same changes — only moving slower. The average age of people getting married is rising. Fertility rates are declining. ... We can no longer assume that religious young people are some kind of different species."

It's urgent, he added, for congregations to "start making a more explicit case for marriage and family. Our young people know that marriage is important, but they don't know specific reasons for WHY it's important."

The result is what some researchers call the "marriage paradox." Young people continue to express a strong desire to "get married at some point," but they place an even higher priority on other "life goals," said Willoughby.

"Marriage becomes a transition in which they fear they will lose freedom or success. ... They hear everyone saying: ‘You go to these schools and get these degrees. You get job one that leads to job two. Don't let anything get in your way or get you off track.' With this kind of head-down approach, serious relationships can be a distraction on the path to success. ... The heart isn't as important."

Thus, marriage isn't disappearing, but the population of young adults choosing marriage is shrinking — especially among those with little or no commitment to religious life. In a study published in 2020, Willoughby cited several reasons this matters, noting that married millennials report:

• Relationships that are more "satisfying and stable" than those living "in other types of committed relationships."
• Significantly lower levels of depression, with better exercise and health trends.
• Better access to health care, insurance and retirement benefits.

In Latter-day Saint congregations, said Willoughby, young women and men are asked to serve in parallel leadership networks, working side by side, week after week. This offers opportunities to spot potential spouses with shared beliefs and goals.

But there is one big problem: "More single men tend to drop out of the faith. Often, the ratio of women to men is way too high when it comes to young adults who are serious about marriage."

Meanwhile, researchers are learning that more and more young men are struggling to master the kinds of basic life skills that make them attractive to women seeking marriage partners, said sociology professor W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.

"I think quite a few women would be happy to meet a man at church and marry him," he said. "But they are still going to want to know: ‘Is this man taking care of himself? Is he gainfully employed? Can he take care of a family? Is he decisive about the issues that matter the most in life?'"

At the same time, many religious leaders need to understand that many of today's dangerous trends in mental and physical health are linked to the growing cloud of digital screens that dominate modern life, said Wilcox.

This is especially true with the social media programs that shape the lives of teenagers and young adults.

"Churches have to find ways to encourage men — single and married — to turn off the internet and their video games and get their acts together. ... And let's face it, it's harder to make major course corrections in life when you're in your 30s," he said.

"All of this will require churches to do a better job of encouraging marriage, sanctioning marriage and helping young people prepare for marriage. ... This has to go beyond the old games-and-pizza approach to youth work and what usually passes for ministries with single adults."

• Terry Mattingly leads GetReligion.org and lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He is a senior fellow at the Overby Center at the University of Mississippi.
• First published by Religion Unplugged. Republished with permission.
• Part II of II. Part I was published in the previous edition of CathNews.

It was an unremarkable breakfast—a fried egg—but it is now digitally fossilized in a floral dish we moved with us when we left New York and headed west.

I don't know why I took the photo, except, well, I do: I had fallen into the reflexive habit of taking photos of everything.

Not long ago, the egg popped up as a "memory" in a photo app!

The timestamp jolted my actual memory.

It was May 2019 when we split up, back when people cancelled weddings and called off relationships because of good old-fashioned dysfunction, not a global pandemic. Back when you wondered if seating two people next to each other at a wedding might result in awkward conversation, not hospitalization.

Did I want to see the photo again?

Not really.

Nor do I want to see the wedding ads on Instagram, or a near-daily collage of wedding paraphernalia on Pinterest, or the "Happy Anniversary!" emails from WeddingWire, which for a long time arrived every month on the day we were to be married.

Never mind that anniversaries are supposed to be annual.

Yet nearly two years later, these things still clutter my feeds. The photo widget on my iPad cycles through pictures of wedding dresses.

Of the thousands of memories I have stored on my devices—and in the cloud now—most are cloudless reminders of happier times. But some are painful, and when algorithms surface these images, my sense of time and place becomes warped.

It's been especially pronounced this year, for obvious and overlapping reasons.

In order to move forward in a pandemic, most of us were supposed to go almost nowhere.

Time became shapeless. And that turned us into sitting ducks for technology.

Our smartphones pulse with memories now.

In normal times, we may strain to remember things for practical reasons—where we parked the car—or we may stumble into surprise associations between the present and the past, like when a whiff of something reminds me of Sunday family dinners. Now that our memories are digital, though, they are incessant, haphazard, intrusive.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when apps started co-opting memories, madly deploying them to boost engagement and make a buck off nostalgia.

The groundwork was laid in the early 2010s, right around the time my now ex and I started dating.

For better or worse, I have been a tech super-user since then too.

In my job as a technology journalist, I've spent the past dozen years tweeting, checking in, joining online groups, experimenting with digital payments, wearing multiple activity trackers, trying every "story" app and applying every gauzy photo filter.

Unwittingly, I spent years drafting a technical blueprint for the relationship, one that I couldn't delete when the construction plans fell apart.

If we already are part cyborg, as some technologists believe, there is a cyborg version of me, a digital ghost, that is still getting married.

The real me would really like to move on now. Continue reading

The Forgivemoji campaign encourages people to design an emoji that represents forgiveness. The team behind the campaign will then decide on the best entry and then submit it to the Unicode Consortium. Read more

The survey found that at one in six of the country's poorest schools, less than a quarter of students had access to internet at home. Read more

He says "for all its achievements, it runs the risk of turning on itself as its impositions overwhelm its conveniences.

"Beyond factual questions ("What is the temperature outside?"), questions about the nature of reality or the meaning of life raise deeper issues," he says.

Kissinger, writing in The Atlantic, said he was on the verge of skipping a session on artificial intelligence when he was attending a conference on transatlantic issues, "but the beginning of the presentation held me in my seat.

"The speaker described the workings of a computer programme that would soon challenge international champions in the game Go."

Go is a game which is more complex than chess.

The speaker explained that the machine learned to master Go by training itself through practice.

"In the process, it exceeded the skills of its human mentors."

The fact that artificial intelligence could become our teacher disturbs Kissinger.

But "Do we want children to learn values through discourse with untethered algorithms?" he asks.

"Should we protect privacy by restricting artificial intelligence's learning about its questioners? If so, how do we accomplish these goals?"

Kissinger says the flood of information and the opinions of multitudes provided by social media are also diverting people from introspection.

"In truth, many technophiles use the internet to avoid the solitude they dread.

"All of these pressures weaken the fortitude required to develop and sustain convictions that can be implemented only by travelling a lonely road, which is the essence of creativity," he says.

Kissinger believes the emphasis on speed inhibits reflection and empowers the radical over the thoughtful.

Its values are shaped by subgroup consensus, not by introspection.

These are some of the other questions he poses:

• How is consciousness to be defined in a world of machines that reduce human experience to mathematical data, interpreted by their own memories?
• Who is responsible for the actions of AI?
• How should liability be determined for their mistakes?
• Can a legal system designed by humans keep pace with activities produced by an artificial intelligence capable of outthinking and potentially outmaneuvering them?

Source

• theatlantic.com
• realclearpolitics.com
• Image: beencrypted.com

Why would St John Paul choose this man who died in 636 and who has never been formally canonised as a saint for this role? Continue reading

That book was published in 1949. It is now 2017, and while we do not exactly have a Big Brother persona governing us, the Orwellian scenario is pretty much familiar.

And it is not by means of some ultra-fascist government or political party.

Rather, our loss of privacy and Big Brother's influence on us are brought about by none other than our penchant for sharing on social media.

What privacy?

In 2013 Vint Cerf, who is considered as the father of the internet, said that "privacy may actually be an anomaly."

Throughout history, people preferred communal settings in just about anything — the concept of solitude and privacy was something limited to monasticism.

Greg Ferenstein outlined the history of 3,000 years of privacy through 46 images.

You might notice that history agrees with Cerf — and the artworks and imagery at least showed how people did things on a communal nature.

It was only during the industrial revolution that we started to have a preference for privacy.

And with the rise of social media, that cycle means we are now moving again toward loss of privacy.

Imagine how much people have been sharing online, with friends and even the public.

This includes photos, status updates, locations, all that while tagging friends who may not be aware they are being connected with photos, events, and places.

It's not even limited to Facebook.

No matter how little you share, all the meta data involved in just about anything you do online can constitute your digital persona.

All of these digital crumbs, so to speak, paint a digital picture of us, which bots, machines, and even data scientists, can lead to our digital makeup.

Add to that the evolving technologies of facial recognition and machine learning — this means tech companies might know more about us than we do.

And this is extremely useful to anyone who needs to do any customer targeting.

Ask advertising agencies and marketers.

In fact, ask Facebook.

Did you know that the social network may have the capability to listen in even when we are not actively sharing information or using the mobile app?

Facebook may be listening

You heard that right.

Given the amount of permissions we give social networks when we install apps on our mobile devices, we might as well just hand them over privileged access to our personal lives.

With passive listening technologies, for instance, Facebook might be able to eavesdrop on conversations.

In 2016, a University of South Florida mass communications professor, Kelli Burns, shared her observations that the Facebook app delivered content based on things she mentioned in a conversation.

The idea that Facebook is passively spying has since been debunked, and Burns herself said her comments may have been taken out of context.

However, this does not preclude the fact that Facebook itself has admitted to using smartphones' microphones whenever necessary.

"We only access your microphone if you have given our app permission and if you are actively using a specific feature that requires audio," it said in a statement.

What can you do: continue reading

I am writing this blog in my office, surrounded by 27 tall bookcases laden with 5,000 books.

Over the years I have read them, marked them up, and recorded the annotations in a computer database for potential references in my writing.

To a large degree, they have formed my professional and spiritual life.

Books help define who I am.

They have ushered me on a journey of faith, have introduced me to the wonders of science and the natural world, have informed me about issues such as justice and race.

More importantly, they have been a source of delight and adventure and beauty, opening windows to a reality I would not otherwise know.

Crisis

My crisis consists in the fact that I am describing my past, not my present.

I used to read three books a week.

One year I devoted an evening each week to read all of Shakespeare's plays (Okay, due to interruptions it actually took me two years). Another year I read the major works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

But I am reading many fewer books these days, and even fewer of the kinds of books that require hard work.

The Internet and social media have trained my brain to read a paragraph or two, and then start looking around.

When I read an online article from the Atlantic or the New Yorker, after a few paragraphs I glance over at the slide bar to judge the article's length.

My mind strays, and I find myself clicking on the sidebars and the underlined links.

Soon I'm over at CNN.com reading Donald Trump's latest tweets and details of the latest terrorist attack, or perhaps checking tomorrow's weather.

Worse, I fall prey to the little boxes that tell me, "If you like this article [or book], you'll also like…" Or I glance at the bottom of the screen and scan the teasers for more engaging tidbits: 30 Amish Facts That'll Make Your Skin Crawl; Top 10 Celebrity Wardrobe Malfunctions; Walmart Cameras Captured These Hilarious Photos.

A dozen or more clicks later I have lost interest in the original article.

An explanation

Neuroscientists have an explanation for this phenomenon.

When we learn something quick and new, we get a dopamine rush; functional-MRI brain scans show the brain's pleasure centers lighting up.

In a famous experiment, rats keep pressing a lever to get that dopamine rush, choosing it over food or sex. In humans, emails also satisfy that pleasure center, as do Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat.

Nicholas Carr's book "The Shallows" analyzes the phenomenon, and its subtitle says it all: "What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains."

Carr spells out that most Americans, and young people especially, are showing a precipitous decline in the amount of time spent reading.

He says, "Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski." Continue reading

• Philip Yancey is the author of several books, including "The Jesus I Never Knew" and "What's So Amazing About Grace?"
• Image: Washington Post

A report from UK think-tank Education Policy Institute (EPI) states that children in the UK have a higher rate of extreme usage (37.8 percent of all UK 15 year olds) than other countries.

Only Chile reported more.

The think-tank examined the relation between social media use (including online time) and mental illness:

While twelve percent of children who spend no time on social networking websites on a normal school day have symptoms of mental ill health, that figure rises to 27 percent for those who are on the sites for three or more hours a day.

There's no clear indication as to whether the extra time online was a catalyst for mental health issues, or if it was the other way around.

The majority of children, whether extreme users or not, reported anxiety whenever there wasn't an internet connection.

Nevertheless, these are indicators of association and do not necessarily prove that social media causes harm to young people's well-being.

For example, it could be that someone already experiencing a mental health problem is more likely to use social media, or that there are other relevant factors.

Extreme internet users are far more likely to be bullied as well; 18-percent reported they'd had negative things spread about them versus only 7-percent of those who reported being online three hours or less during school days.

The study also cautioned against simply restricting a child's access, claiming that this could actually hurt kids in the long run by preventing them from learning the skills they needed to cope with stressful events online.

Instead, parents and schools should be more concerned with teaching children to cope. The researchers even ask Parliament to get involved:

The role of government should be to work with the industry, schools and families to help improve young people's emotional well-being and resilience and to ensure children are taught and supported to learn digital skills as they start to navigate social media for the first time. Continue reading

Sources

• The Next Web article by Tristan Greene
• Image: PsychCentral

He said one of the effective ways to teach children today was to make use of visual media.

"That is the culture we are living today. The children of today are 'screen aged' so they learn faster when they see pictures on the screen," he said.

"It's a very powerful tool and children nowadays don't read much like we did in our young days.

"They want to see something on the screen and that's the culture of children today, so we definitely need to be creative and there's a lot of resources in the internet to use."

On a trip he made to Brisbane in Australia for a conference, Chong said a theologian revealed that he also taught children through movies.

"If you are talking to children and then you show them a screen with pictures or a movie about the lesson you are teaching, they will all turn their heads to the screen," Chong said.

Chong was speaking at a meeting with church members, including Catholic teachers in the North on Sunday night.

Source

• fijitimes.com
• Image: wired.com

Trolling and other antisocial behaviors are widespread online. They can even be found in devout Catholic circles, though outright trollery and the "culture of hate" are perhaps more easily recognized and avoided than a more subtle but related phenomenon: what might be called a culture of wrath, of rage.

Wrath is one of the seven capital sins. Not all anger amounts to the sin of wrath; there is such a thing as righteous anger, as Jesus' own example demonstrates.

For those of us who are not Jesus, though, righteous anger easily slides into the unrighteous kind — and the more we are provoked to anger and outrage, the likelier it is that we will do so.

How much we are provoked to anger and outrage — how much mental energy we give to topics that we find outrageous, scandalous and offensive — is thus an important concern. If there is one biblical exhortation most commonly transgressed on social media by otherwise sincere believers, I suspect it is these well-known, well-loved words of St. Paul:

"Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things" (Philippians 4:8).

These words mustn't be taken too absolutely. There is a place for naming and resisting evil, for alerting and warning others of danger, for outrage, for righteous anger. St. Paul does not mean that dishonorable, unjust, impure things, things worthy of condemnation rather than praise, shouldnever be thought of.

We cannot take Paul's words seriously, though, without taking stock of just how much of our attention and energy we give to thinking about dishonorable, unjust, impure things that are worthy of condemnation, as opposed to honorable, just, pure things that are worthy of praise. Continue reading

Sources

• The Catholic World Report article by Deacon Steven D. Greydanus, a veteran film critic and creator of DecentFilms.com.
• Image: The Wrap

A recent NY Times commentary, "The Art of Condolence" by author Bruce Feiler, wades into these choppy waters of shifting cultural expectations.

Penned after Feiler's own mighty struggle to write a condolence letter upon the death of a teenager in his community, in the essay Feiler reflects upon the condolence letter genre, and then shares seven helpful tips.

The tips seem quite reasonable, actually, but I was struck instead by the framing of the piece.

In the introduction, Feiler notes, "But these days, as Facebooking, Snapchatting or simply ignoring friends has become fashionable, the rules of expressing sympathy have become muddied at best, and concealed in an onslaught of emoji at worst.

"Sorry about Mom. Sad face, sad face, crying face, heart, heart, unicorn."

I take the point, I suppose, that changing patterns of communication are requiring new decisions about what's most appropriate when.

And, Feiler's sixth tip addresses the issue in a general way: "Facebook is not enough."

Of course it isn't.

Two things seem missing in Feiler's quick pass at digital grieving (by the way, a group I'm working with may present some related research down the line).

First, the strength of the relationship with the person mourning matters enormously.

If the grieving party is a close friend, or grieving because of a close friend or relative of mine, of course I will write a hand-written note of condolence. But Facebook and other social media tools extend network relationships well beyond what was possible in the past.

So, if a friend of a friend's cousin who I met at a party once three years ago posts a Facebook update upon a death in the family, it wouldn't actually be appropriate to send a hand-written note.

In that case, using Facebook as a communication platform seems fine. Continue reading

• Adam J. Copeland teaches practical theology, listens to NPR, drinks scotch, devours sharp cheddar, and tries to ask great questions.

The plans are due to be presented to delegates at the Church's annual gathering on The Mound in Edinburgh next week.

It is hoped the plans will start a debate about how to engage more with parishioners while also inviting suggestions for executing baptisms remotely through the internet. Read more

Fr Thomas Rosica told a World Communications Day event in New York that sometimes Catholic conversation online is more "culture of death" than "culture of life".

"Many of my non-Christian and non-believing friends have remarked to me that we ‘Catholics' have turned the Internet into a cesspool of hatred, venom and vitriol, all in the name of defending the faith!" he said.

"The character assassination on the Internet by those claiming to be Catholic and Christian has turned it into a graveyard of corpses strewn all around," said the priest.

Fr Rosica assists the Vatican Press Office with English-speaking media and runs the "Salt and Light TV" Catholic network in Canada.

"Often times the obsessed, scrupulous, self-appointed, nostalgia-hankering virtual guardians of faith or of liturgical practices are very disturbed, broken and angry individuals, who never found a platform or pulpit in real life and so resort to the Internet and become trolling pontiffs and holy executioners!" Fr Rosica said in New York.

"In reality they are deeply troubled, sad and angry people," he said.

"We must pray for them, for their healing and conversion!"

Rather than being against everything, Fr Rosica said, we should be "known as the people who are for something, something positive that can transform lives and engage and impact the culture".

The good news, he said, is that in the broader media universe, Pope Francis has had exactly that effect.

Graduate schools of business and management are now using Pope Francis as a case study in rebranding, Fr Rosica added.

Both Fr Rosica and his "Salt and Light TV" network have occasionally been targeted for on-line criticism, especially from conservative and pro-life Catholic organisations.

Sources

• Crux
• Image: Church Militant

A commission of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference gave a statement to a senate committee in their nation last month.

The committee was making an inquiry into the harm of Internet pornography.

"Children have a right to be children, away from the pressures applied by advertising and other images on television and the Internet for them to dress and act as mini-adults," the bishops' commission stated.

"Bombarding children with sexualized images can hurt their normal development."

Continue reading