From posting prayers to forming faith friendships, cyberspace has become an outlet for expressing spirituality.

Jim St. Arno, Webmaster of PrayerRequestSite.com, created a Web site where anyone can post petitions for which site members will pray.

PRS sends a "prayer chain" to a list of site members called prayer warriors, St. Arno said. Currently 1,507 members participate.

Prayer warriors receive one prayer request each day via e-mail. Each request is normally sent to five warriors.

St. Arno realized the power of prayer after struggling with drinking problems, he said. He remembers his father and his friends from Church prayed often about St. Arno's drinking habits.

The prayers led St. Arno to seek help from a 12-step recovery program, he said. The program and prayers changed his life.

In 1999, St. Arno received a phone call informing him of his son's arrest for possession of heroin. St. Arno said he realized he could help his son through prayer the same way his father and friends had assisted him.

Realizing the potential of prayer and its impact on the lives of others, St. Arno opened a site with a bulletin board for prayer requests.

"The site had its troubles and was very difficult to edit, but it was getting some visitors," St. Arno said.

In June 2000, St. Arno dedicated a Web site solely to the purpose of prayer. He received the first prayer request in July, he said.

"Today PRS receives between 100 and 350 requests a day," St. Arno said. "There are currently 176,744 requests in the database."

People with answered prayers can return to the site and explain how their request was answered, St. Arno said. As of press time, the site listed 4,649 prayers as answered.

"Praying for someone else does wonders," St. Arno said. "And by having a list of other persons' prayer needs available online allows us to do just that."

While some individuals post prayers to connect with their faith, other individuals rely on social networks to communicate with non-Internet based faith groups.

TJ Sellers, a student at the University of Florida, said he uses Facebook to promote the off-line faith formation group Campus Crusade for Christ.

"We have a strong desire to communicate the love of Christ to our entire campus that accurately portrays the nature of His love for us," Sellers said.

"Cru" works to promote the viewpoint that Christ loves everyone, Sellers said.

"Ultimately, the reason this Facebook group was created was to hopefully further promote this concept, and provide a non-threatening forum for anybody to express their opinions," he said.

In addition to posting flyers and hanging banners around campus, Sellers said he and other Cru members felt Facebook would be an effective outlet of communication.

Sellers said he doesn't see the Internet as an outlet to developing his faith.

"I certainly see my relationship with God as being something that is experienced beyond social networking or other online services," he said. "I think there is benefit in terms of communicating information and providing opportunities for people to discuss spiritual issues, but I don't think our faith should be developed through the medium of the Internet."

Scott Carson, associate professor of philosophy at Ohio University, keeps a blog entitled An Examined Life that poses philosophical and theological questions. Spirituality cannot be developed from the Internet, but from within, Carson said.

Carson, who has been blogging since 2005, said he doesn't think of blogging as a spiritual activity and it cannot take the place of face-to-face contact with people, but he has met many people in the Roman Catholic blogging community whose friendship and opinions he values.

"In some cases these new friends have taught me things that I probably would never have learned otherwise," Carson said. "In that sense, the experience is extremely valuable. And in the sense these folks have kept me thinking about my faith in new and different ways."

Carson said he named his blog after Plato's "The Apology of Socrates." In this work, Socrates says, "The unexamined life is not worth living."

"I have always thought that was true, and in my blog I mostly spend my time talking about the underlying assumptions and reasons that people (including me) give for what they hold most dear," Carson said.