Rethinking the soul as the ’Net becomes more lifelike

[Commentary] The question occurred to me as I spent an hour browsing the Web, and on inspection, it seemed to me not entirely nutty. Technology is changing the way we think about all kinds of theological concepts, such as community, prayer, ritual and worship. Why should it not expand our definition of “soul”?

The most intriguing approach to the question of the Internet’s soul, however, comes from the provinces of conventional theology. To many, a “soul” is not just a thing that inhabits an individual; it is also part of a radical union with God and all the world’s other souls, going backward and forward in time, beyond the constraints of bodies and geography. The Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin imagined “above the animal biosphere, a human sphere, a sphere of reflection, of conscious invention, of conscious souls.” He called that realm the noosphere — the sphere of thought — but it might just as well be the Internet, a place where the world’s souls, living and dead, gather together to share of their essential selves and join their sacred individuality together. At the very least, as a universe of songs, images, research projects, existential yearnings and daily disappointments of hundreds of millions of selves, the Internet forces us to imagine in new ways the places where souls, if you believe in such things, might ultimately reside.