KIM LAWTON, correspondent: On any given weekend, some 15,000 people worship with the evangelical Northland Church, but about a third of them never set foot in the building here in Longwood, Florida. They’re worshiping online via the Web and Facebook and Smartphones.

MARTY TAYLOR (Northland Church, Director of Media Design): We call ourselves a church distributed because we don’t want to be confined to this space. We want to be everywhere, every day, and technology is a great tool for us to be able to do that.

LAWTON: On site, worship leaders always welcome the online participants. On this Sunday that includes a small gathering at a nearby prison and people from as far away as Japan. As the main service progresses, online minister Nathan Clark connects with his virtual flock.

NATHAN CLARK (Northland Church, Online Minister): I provide pastoral care. I provide direction and really help them connect to other people around them as well, ultimately to connect them to God while they are in the worship environment.

LAWTON: Sometimes that includes offering an online prayer.

CLARK: For a long time I said, “I will pray for you right now,” and in 20 seconds later, “Okay, I’m done.” But I don’t think that has the punch. I type it all out, and I email all the prayers. A lot of people have told me that the prayers that we exchanged together they actually took and they printed out and carried them around with them afterwards, and it’s cool because it ended up giving that prayer shelf life far beyond what you and I would experience if we did it out loud.

LAWTON: With the explosion of online technologies and social media, religious institutions across the spectrum are finding more and more creative ways to connect with their members and reach out to new audiences. The Vatican, for example, has its own channel on YouTube, while the Dalai Lama tweets updates through Twitter. The innovations are providing new ministry opportunities, but some wonder if they are also changing fundamental beliefs and practices.

Northland Church and its prominent senior pastor, Joel Hunter, have been on the cutting edge of using new technologies, and they are helping others follow suit, especially churches in other parts of the world. Their online worshipers, they say, are demographically much like those who attend the main service. But the online ministry allows Northland to connect with people who wouldn’t have been comfortable attending a church. At the same time, Clark says Northland has created a worldwide church community.

CLARK: The relationships the Apostle Paul had that we see throughout the New Testament were often carried out by letter, and I don’t think there’s anything that substantially different than what we are doing here.

LAWTON: Still, some question the nature of a virtual religious community.

REV. HENRY BRINTON (Fairfax Presbyterian Church, Fairfax, VA): There’s a level of trust and support and accountability that you get in a face-to-face relationship with someone which I don’t think is possible online.

LAWTON: Reverend Henry Brinton of Fairfax Presbyterian Church in Virginia believes that, especially in the Christian tradition, there are limits to how much worship can really occur online.

BRINTON: There is something powerful about coming into a sanctuary and being with others. We still require that baptism be done with water and that communion be a community meal where real bread is consumed, where the fruit of the vine is received, and people do feel a very strong connection with God and with each other through those physical acts.

LAWTON: Northland leaders say they try to build face-to-face connections as well.

TAYLOR: Our goal is not for someone to log in and watch a service and, “Hey, I’m done.” We want them to be in community with other people where they meet together and have a meal together and go out and serve others together.

LAWTON: One way of doing that has been through Roku set-top boxes that enable people to watch Web-streamed video on their TVs. Northland created the first church channel on Roku, which allows people to gather in places from bars to prisons to homes to watch the live stream of the service. About 150 miles away from Northland Church, a small group gathers every Sunday to watch on Marcy and Ron Burth’s 53-inch TV.

RON BURTH (Northland House Church): The main reason why we bought the big TV was for sports.

MARCY BURTH (Northland House Church): We were going to watch tennis, call the balls, be down on the football field. God had other plans.

LAWTON: The Burths hadn’t been able to find a church they liked in their own neighborhood, and they invited neighbors who weren’t part of a church either.

MARCY BURTH: We have a closeness that you don’t have when you’re in a large congregation, but we really do have the benefit of the live service coming into our home.

RON BURTH: It seems to be unorthodox, but yet it’s really the early church that did meet in homes initially.

LAWTON: Would you go back to a traditional church having been through all of this?

MARCY BURTH: Probably not.

LAWTON: Outside Boston, the Daughters of St. Paul are also making active use of new technologies. Their order was founded almost a hundred years ago by an Italian priest who believed the media would have a profound impact on culture.

SISTER KATHRYN JAMES HERMES (Daughters of St. Paul): He said, “Look at the churches.” He said, “Where are the people? The people are not in the pews. Where are they?” So it’s our job to go out to wherever they are and make that place a church, a sanctuary, a place where they can meet God and God can meet them.

SISTER SUSAN JAMES HEADY (Daughters of St. Paul): Whereas maybe people before might have thought they had to go to church to do religion, they are doing it in the comfort of their home, having religious, theological discussions with their friends—maybe even a lot more fun because people like to get on their computer and go on Facebook.

LAWTON: Many of the sisters have blogs, Twitter accounts, and Facebook pages, and they have developed a series of mobile web apps, such as the Rosary App, that people can use on their Smartphones and iPads. Sister Sean Mayer is an administrator of the Facebook page for the award-winning Daughters of St. Paul choir. She says the tool allows them to interact with their fans almost instantaneously.

SISTER SEAN MAYER (Daughters of St. Paul): I try to put up something every two to three days. When we are actually recording or when we’re on the road, it’s every two or three minutes practically.

LAWTON: Their most active site is the “Ask a Catholic Nun” page on Facebook, which has more than 12,000 followers.

SISTER HEADY: The site was founded not to be a place for debates, but more for information so that people who have questions about the faith or who would like to connect with a sister and may not have the opportunity in their local parish could get on and ask a question.

LAWTON: People from all over the world ask questions about the Christian faith or Catholic Church teachings. Some ask for opinions about difficult relationships. Recently, there were some questions from Muslims trying to understand the concept of the Trinity.

(speaking to Sister Heady): Are there sometimes you’re not sure what the right answer would be?

SISTER HEADY: Well, the good thing about Google is anything you want to know you can Google. So I have my reliable sources, the catechism of the Catholic Church. There’s certainly Scripture. There’s other reliable places that you can search out answers.

LAWTON: She recognizes the limitations and tries to direct people to a local priest or counselor, but this format, she says, also has its place.

SISTER HEADY: Sometimes people need to first venture into a safe place where they are unidentified, and they just connect with someone, and I consider it a blessing that they have connected with me and not some other kook that will lead them astray.

LAWTON: Pope Benedict XVI has encouraged the church to use social media, but he cautioned Catholics to make sure they are authentically representing the church online. Professor Stephen O’Leary at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication says the grassroots character of social media does pose challenges to traditional religious authority structures.

PROFESSOR STEPHEN O’LEARY (Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California): In many cases, members of the congregation are acting as media producers and are functioning independently of their own local church. So the authorities from the church—pastor up the line to the denominational heads—no longer have the kind of control that they once did.

LAWTON: O’Leary likens social media to the invention of the printing press, which made the Bible and theological debate more accessible to everyone. This, he says, paved the way for the Protestant Reformation.

O’LEARY: It was the innovation which had changed everything and challenged the authority of the church in a way which was never possible before. I think that today’s media technologies, from the Internet to Twitter and all these things, are having a similar effect on the church.

LAWTON: O’Leary and other experts agree it’s still too soon to know what the ultimate impact of social media will be on religion. Still, many groups say there is no choice but to move forward.

SISTER HERMES: I think we have to have a little more faith in God, that somehow he knows what’s happening and that he himself, God himself, is actually using this means to bring some of his love and peace into the world.

LAWTON: And whatever the impact, there’s no going back.

I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

Originally broadcast May 21, 2010

BETTY ROLLIN (correspondent): It’s called CyberAbuse and it looks like this: “She is a whore and she’s not even good looking.” “Biggest freshman slut.” This is the sort of message that Erin Roy and her sorority sisters found themselves confronted with in Erin’s junior year of college. Erin is now a senior at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, a small college with a Catholic heritage.

ERIN ROY: One day I came home from class, walked in my house, and my housemates were huddled around the computer, and they said that they had heard of and found this Web site. So I went over, checked it out and just saw terrible, terrible things written. Initially it definitely affected a lot of girls I know. I think they were just devastated, embarrassed, upset. Marist is a very small school, so one person hears something, and it spreads like wildfire even if it holds no truth.

ROLLIN: The Web site that was spreading the malicious gossip at Marist and 500 other colleges and universities was called JuicyCampus. Incredibly, the students had no way to stop it since the messages were all anonymously written, and the Web site was under no legal obligation to remove it.

ROY: Some of them definitely, probably were written by men who maybe left off on the wrong foot with a girl. Maybe something happened, and you know he didn’t think of her in the highest regards, and for girls—jealousy. They know this site is anonymous, so they are just so willing to jump on their computer and write comments about people, because they know they will never be caught.

ROLLIN: Erik Zeyher, who graduated from Marist last year, was class president. A fellow student’s email alerted him to the problem.

ERIK ZEYHER (reading an email): “Two of my roommates have suffered eating disorders and have been getting help from the school. Because of this site they have been up for panic attacks most of the night.”

ROLLIN: The site became like a campus virus affecting everyone. There was a particular fear that potential employers would see the comments. Given that there was no legal way to stop postings, the question was how do you stop them? Student leaders and administrators first considered banning the site, then decided to launch a campaign.

ZEYHER: We actually found a program that Princeton was using, they came up with, called “Own What You Think,” which is a way for students to basically voice their opinions in a constructive, respectful—and in a way that isn’t anonymous, so you could find out exactly who was saying what about each other.

ROLLIN: And what were the opinions?

ZEYHER: “Hey Julie, you are the best roommate ever” to “Brandon, thanks for helping me out with my homework. You are a great person and a really great friend.”

ROLLIN: In addition, they flooded JuicyCampus with messages of love.

ROLLIN: So all of this together seems to have worked.

ZEYHER: It actually did. Students really bought into the idea of social change and that we won’t stand for this, and as a community we really made a difference.

ROLLIN: Although JuicyCampus ran out of money and eventually shut down, other sites are alive and well, and the targets are not only on campuses. Michael Fertik, who lives in northern California, is in the business of trying to protect adults and companies from online attacks.

MICHAEL FERTIK (Reputation Defender Inc.): Our customers tell us that their lives had been ruined, that their livelihoods have been ruined, that their sense of dignity has been ruined, that their kids’ mental health has been ruined. Your education, your training, they are all tied up with your name, and your livelihood is tied up with what people see about you when they look up your name online. Our job, where there’s a problem and where we want to remediate the problem by repairing the Google result, is to make sure that the most recent, truthful, and good stuff shows up on the top of Google, and the nasty attacks descend so that they are harder and harder to find.

ROLLIN: This is Manhattan High School for Girls on East 70th Street in New York City, where they consider the act of gossip to be a sin, a huge sin. The Orthodox Jewish girls who attend this school are made aware every day of the danger of gossip, which they call lashon hara. Lashon hara is speaking ill of someone—or even listening to such speech. Even though constructive criticism in conversation can be allowed, harsh criticism is forbidden.

RABBI MORDECHAI PRAGER (Teacher of Jewish law): Human beings which are created in the image of God deserve to be protected. Their dignity should be protected, that even if they do something wrong they should not suffer embarrassment. They should not be degraded by other people.

ROLLIN: This morning the subject of lashon hara is part of Rabbi Prager’s lecture. But what if someone seems to deserve criticism?

RABBI PRAGER (speaking during lecture): Once we establish that the person did something wrong we are still obligated to try to find, to minimize the wrong. Maybe the person doesn’t understand, the person doesn’t know.

ROLLIN: And what about gossip that is intimate but not critical?

RABBI PRAGER: There is a prohibition of spilling the beans. If something was told to you in privacy, the person does not want it to get out, you have no right to tell it to anyone.

ROLLIN: The students regularly do skits about the evils of lashon hara. But avoiding nasty comments isn’t always easy.

MIRI LIDSKY: I think I’ve been in a few situations where I had a really juicy story to tell to people, and it really wasn’t so nice about somebody else, and I stopped and just thought about these laws. Learning the laws every night, it really helped me just bring about an awareness that I stopped to think about before I said the story, that maybe I really shouldn’t say this.

MICHAL LOSHINSKY: Every single day you are talking with your friends and there’s always new conversations and new pieces of gossip to talk about. Like it does get easier, because you first have to learn the laws. You have to want to do it, and you have to push yourself and control yourself.

ITA DAICHES: It turns me into a more positive person, because if I am not saying bad things about other people it affects the way I think.

ROLLIN: There are times when Jewish law allows, even condones lashon hara—when giving factual information in a court of law, for example, or to protect a person from imminent harm. And outside Jewish law, defenders of gossip say that often it’s just a way that friends bond.

ROLLIN: The girls at Manhattan High School are largely unaffected by the biggest conveyor of gossip, namely the Internet. For the most part, this Orthodox community prohibits use of the Internet. But many people, especially young people, virtually live on the Internet, where it’s open season and there is no law to protect them.

FERTIK: That law today is set up in such a way that the Web site where you publish that content is absolutely immune from liability. So even if you do defame someone, absolutely defame someone, the Web site where you publish the content never has to take it down.

ROLLIN: In spite of the victory at Marist College, many other colleges are dealing with the problem of online gossip sites and which, given their growth, will continue to be a problem for some and a temptation for others.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Betty Rollin in Poughkeepsie, New York.

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BOB ABERNETHY, host: We have a profile today of a man who is spending his life trying to help bring about a more ethical America. He is Rushworth Kidder, a former Christian Science Monitor correspondent and columnist who founded and runs the Institute for Global Ethics. As he makes clear in his new book Good Kids, Tough Choices, Kidder wants to help parents help their children make ethical decisions and develop the moral courage to carry them out.

A familiar sight in Rockland, Maine is Rushworth Kidder leaving town. From his think tank, the Institute for Global Ethics, Kidder is on the road about half the time helping corporations, schools and other groups think about what’s ethical. This day-long session was at New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate.

RUSHWORTH KIDDER (speaking to group): So the whole thing is just to think about the characteristics of a morally courageous individual.

ABERNETHY: Kidder says at sessions like this one over 20 years he has talked ethics with 40,000 people. The first step is easy, he says: telling right from wrong. You ask, is this illegal? Against the rules? If not, another question:

KIDDER: We just call it the stench test. Does the thing just plain stink? At some gut level, instinctive way, is this just wrong? Suppose it passes that one. Go on to what we call the front page test: How are you going to feel if everything you did shows up on the front page of tomorrow morning’s paper, or these days on YouTube, on Facebook? And finally, the one I love to get to is what we call the Mom test. The Mom test is what would my Mom do in this situation?

ABERNETHY: Kidder says the most important thing parents can do for their kids is set a good example. He also says there are helpful ways to think about ethical choices, and he demonstrated some of them with a group of parents he invited, at our request, to talk about issues they face.

KIDDER: What do you do as a parent if it’s clear to you that one of your children has told a lie to you?

MOTHER: The three-year-old still tells the truth. The nine-year-old—lying is pretty prevalent. I’d say daily to weekly. It’s been quite an issue.

ABERNETHY: Kidder says younger children lie, but don’t cover it up. Older kids do both.

KIDDER (speaking to parents): There’s a piece of research that describes the fact that, if we’re not careful, by the age of eight kids become—and this is the phrase the researchers used—“fully skilled lie-tellers.” That’s a frightening phrase.

ABERNETHY: Kidder says all cultures identify the same five core values.

KIDDER (speaking to parents): Everywhere we go and do this work, and I’m talking about around the world, we’ve worked in about 30 countries on this kind of idea, we keep hearing people talk about the same thing: honesty, responsibility, respect, fairness, and compassion. There’s no difference between the values held by people who say I am deeply religious and those who say I have no religion whatsoever. This really goes deep.

ABERNETHY: The hardest ethical choices, Kidder says, are not between right and wrong but between right and right, when two or more core values conflict. He told the story of a girl whose friend told her she was anorexic, but swore her to secrecy. Then the girl discovered that her friend’s condition was life-threatening.

KIDDER: Wow, you’ve just dumped that teenager or that middle-schooler right in the middle of a right-versus-right dilemma, where everything about truth-telling is hugely important. You don’t tell the truth, somebody may be dead. On the other hand, you don’t break a promise.

ABERNETHY: Kidder urges parents of young children to drill right and wrong into them. With older children he encourages discussion—recognizing potential conflicts before they occur.

KIDDER: Just having the opportunity in some ways to talk about these things ahead of time with kids, just to begin to get at some of the right-versus-right kinds of questions that come up, you’re at least giving a child a way to understand that oh yeah, these things happen.

ABERNETHY: Of all the ethical issues the group raised, the most troubling was how to handle computers and new social media like Facebook.

FATHER: We’ve had five or six kids sitting in our living room, all on their computers, not interacting with each other.

MOTHER: On weekends in the afternoon we don’t allow any media—and that’s TV, computer, anything—because we need to disconnect.

MOTHER: I am petrified the day that she gets on Facebook. She’s not using email yet, but it’s certainly going to be an issue, and it’s scary.

KIDDER (speaking to parents): This is third grade you’re talking about?

MOTHER: She’s in fourth grade. I have full intention of reading emails before she even has an account. If you’re going to have this account it’s going to be monitored.

FATHER: The power is there to change the world. On the other hand, can it be used for things that are not great? Absolutely, and we’ve seen examples of that: kids, you know, having their sexual preference put up online and committing suicide and things like that.

KIDDER: There is now so much power and so much immediacy in the technology that a single unethical decision put into the system can have consequences that it never could have had 30, 40, 50 years ago.

ABERNETHY: Kidder argues that identifying and choosing what’s right always carries the need to act. He calls that “moral courage,” and one of the group gave an example. Her daughter saw some kids picking on another child on the school bus.

MOTHER: So she is a very quiet girl, but she actually kind of stood up and said, “Hey, stop doing that. That’s bullying,” and I said, “What happened?” She goes, “Well, they didn’t hear me so I had to do it again.” It made me very proud of her. It was something that hopefully was based on our values that she’s ingrained in her.

ABERNETHY: At dinner that night, two of the parents tried out on their two daughters the idea from the discussion of banning all electronic media on weekend afternoons. It did not sell.

DAUGHTER: Why?

MOTHER: They want their kids to be connected with the family again.

DAUGHTER: I feel really bad for those kids.

MOTHER: I kind of like that idea. I thought we should adopt something like that here.

DAUGHTER: I don’t understand. I mean, what would you do?

MOTHER: What about you, Jen? What do you think about that?

DAUGHTER: No. It’s not a good idea.

ABERNETHY: Whatever the resistance, Kidder looks at the power of new technology and sees an urgent need to anticipate its effects and prevent the worst of them. Indeed, he wants to make his Institute’s top priority now trying to create all over the US what he calls “a culture of integrity.”

KIDDER: I think our ethics is climbing. I think maybe the curve is sort of going up like that. I think our technology is going up like this. Unless we can ensure that there is a moral compass behind our uses of the new technologies, we run the risk of putting ourselves in grave danger. Will people look back at us today and say, “You discovered the digital age, and you frittered away the whole thing on Twitter, on Facebook, on Google, on those sorts of things. What on earth were you thinking?”

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Originally broadcast September 4, 2009

SAUL GONZALEZ, correspondent: Unlocking and interpreting the secrets hidden in DNA used to be the province of scientists and medical researchers. But now it’s a growing business, one that’s selling genetic information directly to American consumers, making a DNA test as easy to buy as housewares or clothing.

JACK LORD (CEO, Navigenics): You know, I think for the history of man people have always wanted to see something about their future, and now, through the power of genetics and genomics, we are able to look into the future in a science-based way.

GONZALEZ: Jack Lord is the CEO of Navigenics. It’s a California-based company that for a fee of $999 offers its clients a personalized DNA test, one that pinpoints genetic markers indicating possible future threats to their health.

Jack Lord

JACK LORD: It’s really simple. It’s some saliva that we collect. We analyze that and then give you a report that shows what your risks are compared to people in the population at large. So today we test for 28 conditions, and they range from chronic conditions like diabetes or heart disease, to cancers like melanoma or prostate cancer or breast cancer, to other conditions that are generally silent diseases like glaucoma and macular degeneration, celiac disease, to Alzheimer’s disease.

GONZALEZ: Navigenics is one of a growing number of new companies selling genetic tests directly to the public. All of them promise their clients better health and a better life by getting up close and personal with their DNA.

MIKE GODFREY (Navigenics Client): Once you log into the Navigenics site, you get a snapshot page here that just really outlines in these square boxes what you are at a high risk for, what you are at average risk for, and what you are at lower than average risk for.

GONZALEZ: Mike Godfrey, who works in corporate communications for a hospital in San Diego, is a Navigenics client. When he first got his DNA results back, Godfrey was surprised by his relative risk for several illnesses when compared to the rest of the population.

GONZALEZ (speaking to Mike Godfrey): …diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, heart attack, brain aneurysm, obesity….

MIKE GODFREY: …atrial fibrillation, obesity…

GONZALEZ: That would seem to be a lot to be worried about.

MIKE GODFREY: …Graves disease, which I never even heard of before. So to be honest, in my initial reflection when I looked at this, I went whoa!

Mike Godfrey

Personal trainer to Mike Godfrey: One more. That’s all you need. Just one more.

GONZALEZ: Although he says he’s not overly concerned, Godfrey’s DNA test results have spurred him to think more about his health and spend a lot more time at the gym.

GODFREY: When you look through all of those orange boxes that we went through and you take a look, almost all of them say that you should keep your weight down, that you should stay in shape, that you should eat better. It was validation to me that, yeah, that was the right move and your money is being spent in the right place and the work you are going through is going to be worth it in the end.

GONZALEZ: Lord says his company offers tests only for treatable or preventable illnesses, giving clients an edge in anticipating and avoiding future health problems.

JACK LORD: And it is with that information that they can start to understand what they might do today to prevent an illness. If you know that in advance you can start going to your doctor more frequently to be checked, or you might start a medication that prevents that condition much earlier than when you become symptomatic.

SARAH CROSBY-HELMS (Navigenics Client): It doesn’t say you are going to die, here’s why. It says here are some things you are prone to, and here’s how you can prevent them from showing up in your body later.

GONZALEZ: Sarah Crosby-Helms, another Navigenics client, discovered through her test that she had a higher than usual genetic risk for both colon cancer and Crohn’s disease. The information got Crosby thinking about how much she really wanted to know about future threats to her health.

SARAH CROSBY-HELMS: For me, I would rather know that I have this genetic predisposition than to not know, and if that means that…

GONZALEZ: Ignorance isn’t bliss?

SARAH CROSBY-HELMS: No, ignorance for me is not bliss.

Sarah Crosby-Helms

GONZALEZ: The direct-to-consumer genetics testing industry says it promises its clients a glimpse over their health care horizon, warning them of possible dangers and threats to come. But critics aren’t so sure. They worry that the technology is being oversold and that it raises a host of both ethical and public policy concerns.

ALEXANDER CAPRON (Professor of Law and Medicine, USC): We don’t know everything about the relationship between genes and diseases, and even what we do know doesn’t really tell you that much about what should you do now.

GONZALEZ: Alexander Capron is a professor of law and medicine at the University of Southern California and the former director of the ethics program at the World Health Organization. He’s concerned that as genetic tests become more common, a growing number of people will overemphasize DNA as the road to a long life and personal happiness.

ALEXANDER CAPRON: There are so many other things that are equally or more important and that are actually things that we should be more concerned about in our environment, in our human relations, in social justice, so that all people have an opportunity to have a life in which they can flourish and so forth, and not just narrowly, well, what’s your genetic code? I would also be aware that you could have some surprises that you really don’t want to know, that you would just as soon not have on your mind. What should you do now? What difference should this make in the way you behave, in the health care you get, in your relationships with loved ones, your plans for your future? Should you not take a certain job because the payoff in that job won’t come for ten or twenty years, and you have got a gene that says you have a twenty percent chance of getting breast cancer or something? What should you do with that information?

GONZALEZ: There are also concerns among some health experts about the regulation of direct-to-consumer DNA testing. Currently, no federal agency such as the Food and Drug Administration or Federal Trade Commission has come up with rules to monitor the companies’ marketing claims, testing practices, or the validity of results.

Alexander Capron

ALEXANDER CAPRON: I think we are still in early days on the regulation side, and the FDA has more work to do here. The field has grown, I think, faster than anyone expected.

GONZALEZ: Worried about the licensing, utility, and accuracy of direct-to-consumer genetic tests, some states, such as California and New York, have sent cease-and-desist letters to prominent DNA testing companies. Then there are the privacy worries and whether someone’s genetic information could leak out to insurance companies or employers. Lord acknowledges protecting genetic data is crucial to his company’s reputation and future.

JACK LORD: Privacy is to Navigenics like safety is to Volvo. We have to have — our brand is dependent on privacy and the integrity of privacy and security, and the visual that we use is imagine walking into a bank vault and inside that bank vault there are safe deposit boxes, and the only way you open that safe deposit box is if you have a key, and the bank has the key, and that’s the way we have built our systems. You have control over how that information is accessed, what it’s accessed for, and who actually has access.

GONZALEZ (speaking to Mike Godfrey): You’ve just shared a great deal of your genetic information with us. Do you have any privacy concerns, sharing it with us and by extension an audience across the country?

MIKE GODFREY: Obviously, I don’t.

GONZALEZ: Mike Godfrey’s confidence comes partially from the genetic nondiscrimination privacy act passed by Congress in 2008. It prohibits health insurers from denying coverage based solely on a person’s genetic predisposition.

MIKE GODFREY: My feeling is that those laws will be continued to be updated and that there won’t be much risk to me in the future or to anybody who does this. I think that this will become a pretty standard approach as you go into the future, for adults and maybe even for children when they are very young.

GONZALEZ: As he uses his genetic results to guide his heath decisions, Godfrey is also a test subject. He’s one of thousands of Navigenics clients who have volunteered to be monitored for the next twenty years as part of a scientific study. It’s purpose? To find out how—and if—people change their lifestyles after finding out what’s in their DNA.

Personal trainer to Mike Godfrey: Bring it all the way up.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Saul Gonzalez in Los Angeles.

BETTY ROLLIN (correspondent): It’s called CyberAbuse and it looks like this: “She is a whore and she’s not even good looking.” “Biggest freshman slut.” This is the sort of message that Erin Roy and her sorority sisters found themselves confronted with in Erin’s junior year of college. Erin is now a senior at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, a small college with a Catholic heritage.

ERIN ROY: One day I came home from class, walked in my house, and my housemates were huddled around the computer, and they said that they had heard of and found this Web site. So I went over, checked it out and just saw terrible, terrible things written. Initially it definitely affected a lot of girls I know. I think they were just devastated, embarrassed, upset. Marist is a very small school, so one person hears something, and it spreads like wildfire even if it holds no truth.

ROLLIN: The Web site that was spreading the malicious gossip at Marist and 500 other colleges and universities was called JuicyCampus. Incredibly, the students had no way to stop it since the messages were all anonymously written, and the Web site was under no legal obligation to remove it.

ROY: Some of them definitely, probably were written by men who maybe left off on the wrong foot with a girl. Maybe something happened, and you know he didn’t think of her in the highest regards, and for girls—jealousy. They know this site is anonymous, so they are just so willing to jump on their computer and write comments about people, because they know they will never be caught.

ROLLIN: Erik Zeyher, who graduated from Marist last year, was class president. A fellow student’s email alerted him to the problem.

ERIK ZEYHER (reading an email): “Two of my roommates have suffered eating disorders and have been getting help from the school. Because of this site they have been up for panic attacks most of the night.”

ROLLIN: The site became like a campus virus affecting everyone. There was a particular fear that potential employers would see the comments. Given that there was no legal way to stop postings, the question was how do you stop them? Student leaders and administrators first considered banning the site, then decided to launch a campaign.

ZEYHER: We actually found a program that Princeton was using, they came up with, called “Own What You Think,” which is a way for students to basically voice their opinions in a constructive, respectful—and in a way that isn’t anonymous, so you could find out exactly who was saying what about each other.

ROLLIN: And what were the opinions?

ZEYHER: “Hey Julie, you are the best roommate ever” to “Brandon, thanks for helping me out with my homework. You are a great person and a really great friend.”

ROLLIN: In addition, they flooded JuicyCampus with messages of love.

ROLLIN: So all of this together seems to have worked.

ZEYHER: It actually did. Students really bought into the idea of social change and that we won’t stand for this, and as a community we really made a difference.

ROLLIN: Although JuicyCampus ran out of money and eventually shut down, other sites are alive and well, and the targets are not only on campuses. Michael Fertik, who lives in northern California, is in the business of trying to protect adults and companies from online attacks.

MICHAEL FERTIK (Reputation Defender Inc.): Our customers tell us that their lives had been ruined, that their livelihoods have been ruined, that their sense of dignity has been ruined, that their kids’ mental health has been ruined. Your education, your training, they are all tied up with your name, and your livelihood is tied up with what people see about you when they look up your name online. Our job, where there’s a problem and where we want to remediate the problem by repairing the Google result, is to make sure that the most recent, truthful, and good stuff shows up on the top of Google, and the nasty attacks descend so that they are harder and harder to find.

ROLLIN: This is Manhattan High School for Girls on East 70th Street in New York City, where they consider the act of gossip to be a sin, a huge sin. The Orthodox Jewish girls who attend this school are made aware every day of the danger of gossip, which they call lashon hara. Lashon hara is speaking ill of someone—or even listening to such speech. Even though constructive criticism in conversation can be allowed, harsh criticism is forbidden.

RABBI MORDECHAI PRAGER (Teacher of Jewish law): Human beings which are created in the image of God deserve to be protected. Their dignity should be protected, that even if they do something wrong they should not suffer embarrassment. They should not be degraded by other people.

Rabbi Mordechai Prager

ROLLIN: This morning the subject of lashon hara is part of Rabbi Prager’s lecture. But what if someone seems to deserve criticism?

RABBI PRAGER (speaking during lecture): Once we establish that the person did something wrong we are still obligated to try to find, to minimize the wrong. Maybe the person doesn’t understand, the person doesn’t know.

ROLLIN: And what about gossip that is intimate but not critical?

RABBI PRAGER: There is a prohibition of spilling the beans. If something was told to you in privacy, the person does not want it to get out, you have no right to tell it to anyone.

ROLLIN: The students regularly do skits about the evils of lashon hara. But avoiding nasty comments isn’t always easy.

MIRI LIDSKY: I think I’ve been in a few situations where I had a really juicy story to tell to people, and it really wasn’t so nice about somebody else, and I stopped and just thought about these laws. Learning the laws every night, it really helped me just bring about an awareness that I stopped to think about before I said the story, that maybe I really shouldn’t say this.

MICHAL LOSHINSKY: Every single day you are talking with your friends and there’s always new conversations and new pieces of gossip to talk about. Like it does get easier, because you first have to learn the laws. You have to want to do it, and you have to push yourself and control yourself.

ITA DAICHES: It turns me into a more positive person, because if I am not saying bad things about other people it affects the way I think.

ROLLIN: There are times when Jewish law allows, even condones lashon hara—when giving factual information in a court of law, for example, or to protect a person from imminent harm. And outside Jewish law, defenders of gossip say that often it’s just a way that friends bond.

ROLLIN: The girls at Manhattan High School are largely unaffected by the biggest conveyor of gossip, namely the Internet. For the most part, this Orthodox community prohibits use of the Internet. But many people, especially young people, virtually live on the Internet, where it’s open season and there is no law to protect them.

FERTIK: That law today is set up in such a way that the Web site where you publish that content is absolutely immune from liability. So even if you do defame someone, absolutely defame someone, the Web site where you publish the content never has to take it down.

ROLLIN: In spite of the victory at Marist College, many other colleges are dealing with the problem of online gossip sites and which, given their growth, will continue to be a problem for some and a temptation for others.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Betty Rollin in Poughkeepsie, New York.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: When the sun comes up in Second Life, which it does every four hours, you are immediately overwhelmed by the vast, brightly colored mish-mash of stores, houses, and malls stretching across multiple continents—all of it, including the mountains and forests, designed and built from scratch by the tens of thousands of people who regularly visit here.

Move your mouse and you tour the Taj Mahal. A few clicks and you are launched on a NASA rocket into low orbit. Click again and you can join a service in an Anglican cathedral. This live, online world called Second Life was launched in 2003 by the San Francisco company Linden Lab and its founder Phillip Rosedale, who says he had no idea what would happen.

PHILIP ROSEDALE (Chairman of the Board, Linden Lab): Well, I always figured in the beginning that if Second Life looked like anything we were able to predict that we would have failed, that if it was predictable we weren’t doing the right stuff.

SEVERSON: Second Life is definitely not predictable. Turn a corner and you might run into a furry animal that talks. It isn’t just the buildings that are designed by residents. They also design themselves, creating virtual bodies called avatars either sculpted in their own likeness or, more often, someone they would like to be. And then they chat with other avatars, even becoming close friends. For some, the virtual world is a way to escape. Others say it enriches their real-world lives.

(to Michael Adcock): You still seem to get this social value out of it.

MICHAEL ADCOCK (Freelance Designer): Yeah, I do.

SEVERSON: Michael Adcock has been into Second Life for about three years. He says, for him, hiding his real identity behind an avatar which, in his case, looks like a warrior painted in silver, has helped him learn more about himself.

MICHAEL ADCOCK: I’ve found that I’ve been able to be a lot more up-front and blunt in what is on my mind right away. That happens to say quite a bit about myself, and I choose to look at that as a learning experience.

SEVERSON: Most people in Second Life don’t use real names. The woman you see here might actually be a man, or vice versa.

This avatar actually is a man. He’s Tom Boellstorff, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine and editor-in-chief of the American Anthropologist.  He has written extensively on the culture of virtual worlds.

PROFESSOR TOM BOELLSTORFF (University of California, Irvine): For some people, the escape factor is one of the best things about a virtual world like Second Life. You can try having a totally different life, and there’s people who get married inside of Second Life to someone that they don’t even know who that person is in the physical world, even if it’s really a man or a woman in the physical world. They have a house and even virtual kids and a job, and they have a whole life inside of Second Life.

SEVERSON: It costs nothing to get into Second Life, but if you choose to be part of it, to build a home, for instance, then you will have to spend real money. It’s like visiting a foreign land. You convert dollars into Second Life currency called Linden dollars.

Professor Tom Boellstorff

PROFESSOR BOELLSTORFF: So here is what my house looks like. This is land that I own. I spent—this cost about $50 US to buy this land and about $15 a month to keep, to be able to continue to own it. That’s how the company makes their money.

SEVERSON: You constructed a cathedral like this once?

MICHAEL ADCOCK: Yeah, I did.

SEVERSON: How long did it take you?

MICHAEL ADCOCK: Eighteen months.

SEVERSON: Eighteen months of your life.

MICHAEL ADCOCK: Yeah, off and on, you know.

SEVERSON: Where is it?

MICHAEL ADCOCK: It’s deleted now.

SEVERSON: Wait a minute. Eighteen months, and it’s deleted?

MICHAEL ADCOCK: I couldn’t afford to maintain the simulation, to keep it running, yeah.

SEVERSON: It would have cost him $350 a month to keep it. But there are other cathedrals he can visit which took other residents months or even years to build.

MICHAEL ADCOCK: There is a cathedral right here.

SEVERSON: You don’t look like a typical Sunday churchgoer.

MICHAEL ADCOCK: That’s true, I don’t. But they’re nice, and they welcomed me and asked me how I’m doing.

SEVERSON: It took a decade for churches to have a strong presence on the Internet, but Professor Boellstorff says it is beginning to attract followers in Second Life.

PROFESSOR BOELLSTORFF: There are already people I know who say that they go to, you know, every Sunday they don’t go to church any more in the physical world. They go every Sunday to church in Second Life, and that is their faith community that they are interacting with.

SEVERSON: We spoke with the leadership team of the Anglican Cathedral of Second Life. Mark Brown is the priest-in-charge. In real life he runs a Bible society in Wellington, New Zealand. Cady Enoch chairs the committee. She’s in Columbus, Ohio, and Helene Milena is the worship service leader. She’s in West Yorkshire, England.

HELENE MILENA (Teacher and Counselor): I think there is an intimacy here, in any online set-up, actually, but at the same time there is an anonymity, and the two mean that people can be very, very open. It would be very unusual in real life to meet someone and ten minutes later be knowing about their difficulties with their marriage, or something of that nature.

SEVERSON: In order to accommodate attendees from around the world, the virtual church is now offering 7 services a week.

MARK BROWN (CEO, New Zealand Bible Society): Straightaway it is the opportunity to mingle with people around the world. We have about 20 nations represented in our community. I absolutely love that. I love the richness of that, that regardless of where we are in the world, we can come together and worship.

SEVERSON: Second Lifers tend to become hooked on the experience. Michael Adcock says he was spending 12 or more hours a day for awhile. This can have negative consequences on real-world relationships. There have been at least two highly publicized divorces resulting from what were supposedly virtual affairs in Second Life. Questions are often raised about ethical behavior by people who can hide behind anonymous identities on the Internet.

SIBLEY VERBECK (Founder and CEO, The Electric Sheep Company): If you look out on the Web, as long as there’s been forums where people post comments or chat rooms, people are often quite rude to each other, and a lot of that is that degree of anonymity that’s there.

SEVERSON: Sibley Verbeck founded the Electric Sheep Company, which has created its own virtual worlds. He thinks people tend to be more civil in Second Life

SIBLEY VERBECK: But it is more human, because you see this human figure, and you’re interacting with them in real time.

MICHAEL ADCOCK: I don’t see much of a difference between what I’m doing here, or what I’m thinking, or what I’m doing in my real life. It’s all the same thing.

SEVERSON: There’s not much you can’t find or do in Second Life. There are virtual shops that sell everything from virtual artwork to virtual waterfalls. Second Life is a community of creators, and it’s economy is based to a large extent on marketing art and architecture.

PHILIP ROSEDALE: So far as we can tell, there’s like 60,000 people that are cash-flow positive from their operations, but there’s thousands of people that would call this employment of some kind.

SEVERSON: Elisha Allen is director of new media and extended learning at the University of New Mexico. Like many learning institutions, the university is experimenting with Second Life as way to reach students who can’t make it to the campus.

ELISHA ALLEN (Associate Director, New Media and Extended Learning, University of New Mexico): I’ve been to a number of conferences in Second Life where I had the opportunity to meet peers at other universities without actually having to fly there, and it’s interesting because the memories of those conferences are very real, and it did feel like I was there, wherever “there” was.

SEVERSON: But Elisha agrees with those who say that navigating around Second Life can be daunting.

ELISHA ALLEN: Second Life, while it’s maybe the state-of-the-art for virtual worlds right now, I think has a long way to go before it’s something that I would consider to be really, fully immersive.

SEVERSON: For others, like Reverend Mark, it’s a godsend.

MARK BROWN: There’s no artificiality of me, here I am sitting in my study in New Zealand looking at a monitor. I am real flesh-and-blood. The way I am communicating and relating, of course, is different, but the same experience is welling up, and that is really how this is able to be intense and intimate and actually quite a real experience.

SEVERSON: About a million-and-a-half people have visited Second Life in the last couple of months. They are typically in their mid-thirties. But there are millions of kids under 12 who are growing up with virtual reality games and programs designed especially for them. Verbeck and others predict that a decade from now, when these kids are in their 20s, places like Second Life are going to grow dramatically in popularity.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in San Francisco.

KATE SEELYE: Here at al Azhar, one of the Muslim world’s oldest and most respected centers of learning and worship, Muslims come to study and pray and to ask how to live a devout life in the modern world. They come for fatwas — religious rulings that are nonbinding. Clerics give advice on how to be good Muslims in matters of religion, family and even finance.
This vendor says fatwas are indispensable.

MOHAMMED (through translator): You feel very reassured after getting a fatwa, and you know you can build your future plans on it.

SEELYE: But recently, some of Azhar’s fatwas have come under criticism. Last year a cleric ruled that an unmarried man and woman could work together alone, which is normally forbidden in Islam, but only if the woman established a maternal relationship with her colleague by breastfeeding him five times. The cleric was suspended for his fatwa, which raised questions about Islam’s relationship with modernity.

In Egypt, the modern and the traditional live side by side. Like other developing countries, Egypt has been flooded in the last decade with new technologies like satellite TV and the Internet, and that’s exposed this conservative society to a confusing mix of Western values and culture.

Dr. Ragab Abu Malih

Islam Online is trying to help Muslims navigate this fast-changing environment. It’s one of the Muslim world’s most popular Internet sites and provides religious advice as well as counseling and information about health, science, and culture in both Arabic and English.

Clerics like Ragab Abu Malih take questions during live fatwa sessions four times a day. He says he receives more than 700 queries daily but can only answer a fraction of them.

Dr. RAGAB ABU MALIH (Managing Editor, Shari’ah Section, Islam Online, through translator): I think if we answered the 700 questions, then more would come. People are asking questions they never had before because of new technologies and influences.

SEELYE: Questions include whether it’s permissible to find a spouse through the Internet. Can a man divorce his wife in a text message? And what about Internet chatting? Flirting between men and women is forbidden in Islam, but can they chat online? According to clerics here, it’s best if a third party monitors the chat.

ABU MALIH (through translator): The Qur’an did not mention these details in their entirety, but it guides us in our advice.

SEELYE:  But critics question the advice being given. Islam Online may be using modern technology, but it’s spreading a very traditional message. The cleric who founded the site, Yousef Qaradawi, is considered a moderate in the region. But his fatwas have opposed women traveling alone without a male guardian, and he’s ruled against women being heads of state.

For secular Muslims like Dalia Ziade, such views are decidedly anti-modern. Ziade is a human rights activist. The 26-year-old accuses religious institutions in Egypt of spreading fundamentalist beliefs, like the veiling of women.

Dalia Ziade

DALIA ZIADE (Cairo Office Director, American Islamic Congress): In my mother’s age, when she was my age, I see her photos. It was tremendously different. It was, you know, she wore short skirts and she used to wear t-shirts without sleeves, sleeveless t-shirts, and nobody used to ask her or to instruct her not to wear this or wear that.

SEELYE: Ziade says in today’s environment she has to wear a headscarf in order not to be harassed. She blames this on what she calls the growing piety movement.

Ms. ZIADE: Everyone now believes that if only he gets religious, all his problems will be solved.

SEELYE: As part of her work, Ziade’s been compiling fatwas that target women. Some clerics say they can’t walk on the same side of the street as men. This fatwa from a high-profile Islamist claims they’re not fit to be judges. Ziade says in this day and age the principles of modernity should be universal — principles like the acceptance of individual and women’s rights, reason, doubt, and the separation of mosque and state. Instead, she says, Islamists are taking Egypt back to another era.

Ms. ZIADE: You know, now I can travel anywhere in the world through my Internet connection. I can go to the U.S right now and see anything there. So how come in this open communication with the whole world I’m still in prison with these ideas?

SEELYE: These ideas like…

Ms. ZIADE: These fundamentalist ideas that go back 1,400 years ago.

SEELYE: Egyptians have always been religious, but just a few decades ago society was far more secular. Now Islam is increasingly part of the public sphere. Qur’anic chants are played in taxis, restaurants, and shops. Signs encouraging women to wear the headscarf are plastered on walls. The Niqab, the full face covering virtually unseen in the past, is increasingly common. More and more men display prayer bumps on their foreheads. The piety trend, say analysts, is fueled by political frustration, poverty, and increasing Saudi influence, and it also has the support of much of Egypt’s middle and professional classes.

Ahmad Abu Haiba

Ahmad Abu Haiba is a prominent media professional. He’s launching the region’s first Islamic music video channel to spread faith-based values. This video is about a farmer’s dreams of going to Mecca.

AHMAD ABU HAIBA (Executive Director, 4Shbab TV): This is how a Muslim should be: he’s a good man, he has good relations with all the people around him, he loves kids, he loves simple people.

SEELYE: Abu Haiba named his station  4Shebab, or “For Youth” in English. He says he’s using the power of satellite TV to help rebuild a Muslim youth identity.

Mr. ABU HAIBA: We don’t have a clear, stable, strong identity, and that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to help the young people to establish their identity. This is the same identity that the Prophet Muhammad presented to his companions.

SEELYE: Abu Haiba hopes his videos will help counter some of what he says are the negative influences of Western music videos and television.

ABU HAIBA: And this drove us now to drugs and relationships, which really doesn’t fit with our culture.

SEELYE: In contrast, his videos emphasize community and family values, like respect for elders. Women mainly play the role of wives and mothers in the background. Abu Haiba says he doesn’t choose to embrace the principles of modernity, because they’re not in keeping with Islamic values.

ABU HAIBA: I don’t think that modernity is part of these values. I mean, when I learn Islam I know there’s a part of it that cares about people’s life and people’s life changes. But still always the major values and the major pillars as it is never change with time. Modernity is something linked with time, and Islam is timeless.

SEELYE: That view of Islam is the problem today, says Gamal al Banna, a reformist cleric. He says Islamists have a fixed reading of the Qur’an because long ago scholars banned new interpretations of the religious texts.

Gamal al Banna

GAMAL AL-BANNA (President, Islamic Revival Movement, through translator): The religious institutions tell us that innovation will lead us down the wrong path. Anything that has to do with innovation is dangerous, and that’s wrong. You can’t say that religious opinions made over 1,000 years ago are valid for all times. We must have a revolution in the understanding of Islam, a revolution almost like Martin Luther’s.

SEELYE: Until then, says Banna, Islam will not be able to accommodate itself to the modern world. The 88-year-old has written dozens of books about the need for the renewal of Islam and the importance of the separation of religion and state. He’s even issued a fatwa saying Muslim women don’t have to cover their hair. Banna says Muslims must stop relying on scholars to interpret the holy texts. Instead, he says, they should read the Qur’an directly, keeping in mind its emphasis on knowledge and wisdom.

Mr. AL BANNA (through translator): The Qur’anic verse goes, “It was revealed to them, the Qur’an and wisdom.” The search for wisdom has proven itself to be a successful experiment for all peoples and all times. We have to adapt, and we have to learn from all other experiences with wisdom so that Islam isn’t a closed box, but it has an open window to the world.

SEELYE: Banna believes such reform will take place, but long after his lifetime.

For RELIGION AND ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, I’m Kate Seelye in Cairo.