coming up -- religious groups, finding new and creative ways to use social media, but is this changing beliefs and practices? also, a writer and professor, a cuban émigre, who had a life-changing conversion experience within catholicism. >> what had been scary to me, what had been frightful, suddenly turned in to the most beautiful thing. >> welcome.

>> welcome. i'm bob abernethy. it's good to have you with us. as nato forces assumed control of the operations in libya, debates continued in the religious community over the intervention. some religious leaders say the military action meets just war criteria, but others have raised concerns over damage caused by the bombing. earlier, in rome, pope benedict called for an immediate suspension of fighting. and, a catholic bishop in tripoli, libya's capital, said that at least 40 civilians have been killed by air strikes. some aid groups said the violence prevented them from reaching those in need. meanwhile, italy could be facing a humanitarian crisis, as thousands flee the unrest in north africa.

more than 6000 migrants have arrived at the small italian island of lampedusa, near sicily. some have been relocated to italy's mainland; others may be sent back to the countries they left. religious leaders also voiced concern for the ivory coast, as fighting intensified there this week. the conflict began last november after the president refused to leave office after losing the election. since then, more than 1 million people have fled the violence and more than 400 people have been killed. this week, pope benedict called for an immediate end to the conflict. he also announced that he would be sending an envoy to the country to help facilitate peace. in japan, relief efforts continue for victims of the earthquake and tsunami. the united nations says the country still needs more temporary shelter, sanitation help and medical supplies.

some faith-based groups report that fuel shortages and power outages have made it difficult to reach victims. fears of radiation have also forced some aid groups to relocate farther away from affected areas. one of israel's chief rabbis suspended interfaith dialogue between jewish and muslim leaders, this week, following last week's bombing in jerusalem. the rabbi said muslim leaders had not adequately condemned the violence and that dialogue will remain suspended until the attack is denounced. as congress continued to debate big reductions in federal spending, a coalition of religious leaders from 38 organizations began a fast aimed at persuading congress not to cut funds for the poor and hungry in the u.s. and around the world. we've talked and talked and talked and we've lobbied, and we've reasoned, we've sent

letters, we've admonished, that's why we're having the fast. it's time to call in god. it's time to unleash god. a line has been crossed in this debate. extreme budget cuts are now being proposed and this fast is what i call a spiritual escalation, a spiritual escalation to bring those critical moral choices to the attention of the nation and seek god's help in doing so. we can reduce our deficit, we should reduce the deficit, but we can do that without hurting people who are already hungry and poor. >> the leaders of the fast said about 4000 people have joined them, each in his or her own way, such as water only for one week. also, on capitol hill this week, senator dick durbin of illinois convened a hearing on the civil rights of american muslims. the event came less than a month

after representative peter king's highly- controversial house hearing into homegrown muslim radicalization. durbin said he hoped his hearing would counter islamophobia in the u.s. cardinal theodore mccarrick, former archbishop of washington, was among those testifying. he said america should be an example for the rest of the world. >> as other countries wrestle with how to treat religious minorities, let them look to our nation, where we work to ensure that our muslim sisters and brothers are treated with dignity and that their religious identity and beliefs must be treated with respect. we have a special report today on religion and social media. faith-based groups are finding new and creative ways to use online technologies. many say this is dramatically expanding the reach of their ministries. but what impact is it having on beliefs, practices, and religious authority structures?

kim lawton takes a look. on any given weekend, some 15,000 people worship with the evangelical northland church, but about a third othem never set foot in the building here in longwood, florida. they're worshipping online via the web and facebook and smartphones. >> 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. >> onsite, worship leaders always welcome the online participants. >> we have dirk from new hampshire. >> reporter: 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. >> 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. sometimes that includes offering an online prayer. >> for a long time, i said 'i will pray for you right now' and in 20 seconds later, 'ok, 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. >> 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 worshippers, 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. >> 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. still, some question the nature of a virtual religious community. >> 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. >> 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. >> 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. >> northland leaders say they try to build face-to-face connections as well. >> 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. >> 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 livestream 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. >> the main reason why we bought the big tv was for sports. >> we were going to watch tennis, call the balls, be down on the football field. god had other plans. >> 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. >> 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. >> it seems to be unorthodox but yet it's really the early church that did meet in homes initially. >> would you go back to a traditional church having been through all of this? >> probably not.

>> 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. >> 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. >> 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. >> 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. >> 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. >> their most active site is the "ask a catholic nun" page on facebook, which has more than 12,000 followers. >> 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. >> 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. >> are there sometimes you're not sure what the right answer would be? >> 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 where you can search out answers. >> she recognizes the limitations and tries to direct people to a local priest or counselor. but this format, she says, also has its place. >> 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 th astray. >> pope benedict the sixteenth 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. >> 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. >> o'leary likens social media to the invention of the printing press, which made tmade the bib theological debate more accessible to everyone. this, he says, paved the way for the protestant reformation. >> 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. >> 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. >> 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. >> and whatever the impact, there's no going back. >> i'm kim lawton reporting. >> meanwhile, the daughters of st. paul, the order of nuns in kim's report, is in a legal dispute with the archdiocese of boston over pension funds. the sisters have been trying to withdraw from the archdiocese pension fund and establish their own plan for their lay employees. they filed a lawsuit, claiming the archdiocese did not give them a full accounting of their portion of the fund. the archdiocese says it is hoping to resolve the issue through mediation. in oregon, the jesuit order agreed to pay 166 million dollars to victims of clergy sex abuse. the abuse occurred at jesuit

schools throughout the pacific northwest and in alaska from the 1950s through the 1980s. most of the victims were native american or native alaskan. the settlement is the third largest in u.s. church history. and a follow-up to a story we aired last week about a proposed merger between a catholic and a secular hospital in arizona. the sierra vista regional health center had plans to merge with the catholic carondelet health network. some doctors said they worried that after the merger they would have to defer to catholic bishops when it came to certain medical decisions, especially those dealing with women's reproductive health. this week it was announced that the hospitals will no longer merge. we have a profile today of carlos eire, a cuban émigre who is now a prominenprofessor of religion and the winner of a national book award for his

memoir, waiting for snow in havana. he is also a convert within his own faith tradition, from the strict spanish catholicism of his boyhood to the more loving catholicism he says he found here. bob faw reports. >> reporter: in 1517 something happened that had happened many times before. >> carlos eire is at a pinnacle of the academic world, with an endowed chair at yale, where he teaches religious studies, he's also written six books, including the memoir waiting for snow in havana which won the national book award. but just as remarkable as his rise from cuban refugee to professor of distinction is carlos eire's spiritual odyssey. >> it is an incomprehensible and in many ways an indescribable experience. what had been scary to me, what had been frightful, suddenly

turned into the most beautiful thing. >> in pre-castro cuba, eire's was a life of privilege, the festive holidays, and lavish birthday parties at grand estates, befitting the son of a wealthy and influential judge and a gorgeous mother. but their spanish catholicism terrified young carlos. >> there was no place in the world scarier for me as a child than a church. it's my worst nightmare, being locked in a church all night long because the images were so frightening. >> what tormented him most, eire recalls, was his father's collection of icons of christ. >> the crown of thorns on his head, bleeding. it was in his study, right near the jesus plate with the eyes that followed you. >> eire's comfortable life came crashing down when fidel castro seized power.

only 11, eire new his life had changed when the new regime prevented him from seeing a walt disney film, 20,000 leagues under the sea. that he'd already seen seven times. that was the turning point for me. i really felt like someone was trying to steal my soul, not just invade but claim it as their own, some authority outside of me, and that's when i began to see everything in a different light. >> fearful, their world collapsing, eire's parents sent him and his brother, tony to the united states in 1962, two of 14,000 cuban children airlifted from cuba in an operation dubbed pedro pan. like many of the other children, carlos and tony lived with foster families. they would never see their real father again. their mother would join them only years later. when carlos left cuba his parents gave him a book they

said would bring him comfort. >> it was, the imitation of christ by thomas a kempis, for centuries had been a very popular text in spanish speaking cultures. it's all about self denial, it's about not being part of the world. it's very monastic in its outlook. >> you wrote in the miami book, 'it scared me half to death. it is the most depressing book ever written by any human being in all of human history!" >> from a child's perspective, yes, definitely. >> but in miami, living with foster parents who were jewish but made him go to a catholic church every sunday, eire was unshackled for the first time from the catholicism of cuba and its troubling images of pain and suffering. >> after i had come to the us and seen churches that were free of such images. i realized that spanish catholicism and latin american

catholicism was very different from american catholicism in that respect and sort of put a less scary pall over religion. >> when eire and his brother moved in with his uncle in illinois, there were no more gory images of jesus. >> my uncle had this very protestant image of jesus above his armchair, totally unscary. friendlier, more accessible, jesus for every child. >> though liberated from the demons of his youth, eire says he was still plagued, even crippled, by what he calls, "the void." >> it attacked me, cause it seemed to come from outside of me, a feeling of utter abandonment and emptiness and having no connection to anything or anyone, and having no one or anything beyond one's self. everything was turning dark. >> but as carlos eire so movingly writes in his second

memoir, learning to die in miami, that overwhelming despair was shattered on holy thursday, 1965 in a profound religious experience. >> it was that period when i started reading the imitation of christ, not just little passages but actually getting into the meaning, and it brought me to this experience, a profoundly religious experience. i think it's fair to call it a conversion experience. >> ' everything changes,' you wrote, 'everything changes from top to bottom, a void rips loudly and light pours thru.' >> up until that point i always thought that spirit was insubstantial. it's with that experience that i realized that spirit is more substantial than matter. because it is connected to eternity. time stops, all there is, is now, and this now is forever. >> after experiencing what he

calls "that presence," eire says religion became his "salvation" and he was able, carlos says, "to let go." >> thinking that there's something beyond this life helps one immensely in letting go. without some other dimension letting go to me is too painful, impossible. >> you wrote, "he who knows best how to let go will enjoy the greater peace because he is conqueror of himself." >> letting go of your attachment to things and even your attachment to your own will and your own attempt to make sense of the world your own way and kind of open yourself up to something higher. >> not all those haunting images from his past have been excised. he anguishes, he says, over what is happening in cuba today. >> i could not in a sense stop feeling the pain, the so-called

free education and free medical care come at the cost of slavery; cubans right now are no different than slaves in a plantation in the american south before the civil war. europeans and canadians who go to cuba to have a good time, i can't understand. it would be like vacationing in the third reich and having a good time ignoring auschwitz. >> while cuba he says "is a wound that will not close," the scars from his earlier religious trauma have healed. >> yes, there is pain and suffering, but it can be transcended and it can be redemptive. i was able to let go of everything i had lost, including my parents. and i was able to focus on what the purpose of life should be.

not as regaining everything i had lost but rather giving one's self to others. >> carlos eire, a long way from cuba, but waiting no more. for religion and ethics this is bob faw in new haven, connecticut. that's our program for now. i'm bob abernethy. we have much more on our website, you can comment on all of our stories and share them. audio and video podcasts are also available. you can follow us on facebook and twitter, find us on youtube, and watch us anytime, anywhere on smart phones and iphones with our mobile web app. join us at pbs.org. as we leave you, more music from northland church in longwood, florida. ♪

♪ major funding is provided by --