There is an institutional opposition that seeks to maintain the institutional status quo, a theological opposition that's resisting "synodality", the newest phase of the reception of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), and a political opposition that sees very clearly the pope's attempt to dis-align Catholicism from the various versions of the "America first" worldview.

But the United States is a big country with an ebullient religious and spiritual scene.

Everything here tends to be interpreted in a two-party and almost metaphysical division of everything - "liberals vs. conservatives".

The country split between contrasting views of what it means to be "American", is experiencing an identity crisis. This is a cultural phenomenon that the Catholic Church and the Vatican needs to take seriously.

Looking to satisfy a spiritual hunger

Tara Isabella Burton, an essayist with a PhD in theology from Oxford University, published a very interesting article last year in The New Atlantis. She discusses the rise of a "loose online subculture known as the post-rationalists".

The piece is titled "Rational Magic.

Why a Silicon Valley culture that was once obsessed with reason is going woo".

It examines a new online subculture that has emerged in the last decade in various quarters - online, social media, and the virtual world — where many influential Americans and Anglo-Americans with a spiritual hunger now congregate.

One of the most important places to look, in order to understand what is coming on our screens, in front of our eyes and in our brains, is Silicon Valley.

The people who people live and work there, or are connected with, have immense power to influence our culture in many different ways.

Burton says that a new elite has concluded that "rationality culture's technocratic focus on ameliorating the human condition through hyper-utilitarian goals" has "come at the expense of taking seriously the less quantifiable elements of a well-lived human life".

She points out that was becoming clear already the last decade.

"By the late 2010s, the rationalist landscape had started to shift, becoming increasingly open to investigating, if not necessarily the truth claims of spirituality, religion, and ritual, then at least some of their beneficial effects," Burton writes.

Her essay does not address Catholicism directly, except for this disturbing passage:

There's the rise of what you could call popular neo-Jungianism: figures like Jordan Peterson, who point to the power of myth, ritual, and a relationship to the sacred as a vehicle for combating postmodern alienation — often in uneasy alliance with traditionalist Christians. (A whole article could be written on Peterson's close intellectual relationship with Roman Catholic Bishop Robert Barron.)

There's the progressive-coded version you can find on TikTok, where witchcraft and activism and sage cleansing and "manifesting" co-exist in a miasma of vibes.

There's the openly fascist version lurking at the margins of the New Right, where blood-and-soil nationalists, paleo bodybuilders, Julius Evola-reading Traditionalists like Steve Bannon, and Catholic sedevacantist podcasters make common cause in advocating for the revival of the mores of a mystic and masculinist past, all the better to inject life into the sclerotic modern world.

What transpires from online culture is a phase of disenchantment with progressive faith in technology and with the promises made by the new masters of the universe since computer technology and the internet changed our lives.

This is how Burton describes it:

The chipper, distinctly liberal optimism of rationalist culture that defines so much of Silicon Valley ideology — that intelligent people, using the right epistemic tools, can think better, and save the world by doing so — is giving way, not to pessimism,exactly, but to a kind of techno-apocalypticism.

We've run up against the limits — political, cultural, and social alike — of our civilizational progression; and something newer, weirder, maybe even a little more exciting, has to take its place.Some of what we've lost — a sense of wonder, say, or the transcendent — must be restored.

This particular disillusionment with technocracy and rationalism, and its openness to the transcendent, is not a return to traditional Christianity.

Burton says it is also a refusal of a naïve secularism that is "no less full of unexamined dogma, tinged with moral and intellectual unseriousness".

Core message of Vatican II is non-negotiable

What Tara Isabella Burton writes here is extremely important, not just for the United States and its Catholics, but also for Pope Francis and the Roman Curia.

This is especially true for dealing with sensitive issues, such as the culture of the current generation of young priests and seminarians, the movement for "the reform of the liturgical reform" and the so-called "Traditional Latin Mass".

To be sure, there are hotbeds of an unapologetic anti-Vatican II sentiment spiked with sectarianism and neo-Gnostic vibes to be found in the techno-apocalyptic Catholic right.

As I wrote already at the beginning of 2010, what's at stake are ecclesiological issues on which the teaching of the Church must be firm.

When dealing with the core message of Vatican II, no negotiation is possible.

In the United States, however, the movement to perpetuate the so-called "Traditional Latin Mass" is a rejection of Vatican II.

It is also linked to libertarianism, a key cultural attitude present in much of America, including religious America.

The Old Mass proponents, in fact, in see Vatican II and the current pope as part of a technopower that is oppressing their genuine religious quest.

This attitude looks similar to that which shaped Marcel Lefebvre's traditionalism, but it's not quite the same.

This is why it's a movement that will continue underground, and at the same time to be hosted in rooms close to people in power in the United States.

A "legitimate weird" that can be acceptable

But there is also a post-rationalist hunger for the weird that is not exactly the same as the nostalgia for the "smells and bells" from an over-idealised past most of our contemporaries never knew.

It's something that the institutional Church struggles to discern and distinguish.

On the one side is the "openly fascist version", driven by provocateurs like Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò and the traditionalist Catholic convert Taylor Marshall.

On the other side are those who embrace a "legitimate weird" for which there must be space in the enlarged tent of a synodal Church.

This post-rationalist disenchantment with secular modernity and re-enchantment with the transcendent is more a Werner Herzog-like fascination with the wild and strange, the numinous and the primal.

It is less about the heresiological view of Christianity à la Cardinal Gerhard Mueller.

It's also very different from the techno-optimism of some post-ecclesial, trans-humanist Catholic theologians.

They are not just in the United States.

If you want to understand the success of the post-rationalist turn, just look at the success of the Italian publishing house Adelphi Edizioni and the titles of its books on religion (one of them, a collection of esoteric essays by the late Cristina Campo, was recently translated into English).

Without a doubt, Catholic theology is also struggling with this new subculture, maybe even more than the institutional Church.

The language of academic theology is deeply shaped (if not dominated) by the social sciences and a religious studies approach.

It is less literate about philosophy and history.

Thus it has become difficult to capture the healthy instincts and even unconscious deep theological insights that come from these apparently marginal, but influential voices.

A more capacious and less polarised Church

The attitude that this post-rationalism charts — a realism laced with reference to the transcendental — takes experience into account and recognizes (in the language of Thomas Aquinas) that grace perfects nature.

It is a useful and serious critique of the wholesale objectification/quantification of everyday experience.

It also converges, not just with Pope Francis' strong critique of the technocratic paradigm, but also with Vatican II theology both in its ressourcement and aggiornamento versions and especially in their interaction with critical theory.

To those who don't know the different faces of the vitality of the Catholic tradition, these woo and weird post-rationalists look like natural candidates to qualify as traditionalists - different and opposed to a dynamic, but Enlightenment-derived idea of the tradition.

But that would be a simplistic answer.

Acknowledging the validity of some points of this contemporary culture "going woo" entails some conversions in how we look at non-conformist Catholic voices, including, for instance, some of seminarians and younger priests.

But Catholic theological academia is not always open to giving a voice and or listening to those who express such "diversity".

The Church needs to be more capacious in its theological culture, lived expressions, and liturgical life. This capaciousness must not be, as often said in academic jargon, "less Catholic".

But just the opposite. It should be more Catholic.

A certain passion for the weird and the woo in Catholicism has never been and never will be everyone's cup of tea. But recognizing that there is also space in the tent for those Catholics from whom it is may be the first and most necessary step towards addressing polarization in the Church.

• Massimo Faggioli is a Church historian, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much-published author and commentator. He is a visiting professor in Europe and Australia.
• First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

In fact, something more nuanced is happening: we remain "religious" but spirituality is both personal and elusive - and outside the institutional status quo.

We live in a godless age. Don't we?

The dominant cultural narrative holds, of course, that we do.

Once upon a time, this prevailing narrative goes, we - at least, we in the modern West - lived in a religious age; moreover, we lived in a specifically Christian age.

For centuries - indeed, millennia - people were united by their shared beliefs, their shared values, their shared investment in a community suffused with an appreciation for, and with the influence of, the transcendent.

People lived their lives in dialogue with the sacred.

• They structured their days, their weeks, their months, their years, around religious rituals and liturgical calendars.
• They lit candles in churches.
• They prayed for deliverance from sickness and sometimes tried to effect healing with folk magic or herb-based spells.
• They believed that material objects - the relics of saints, say - could be charged with spiritual energy and that just touching them could transform your body and your health.

For these believers, the world was what German political and economic theorist Max Weber described as an "enchanted garden": a world in which the boundaries between the sacred and the profane are often porous, slippery, and ill-defined.

Changes

Then, everything changed.

Be it the dawn of the European Enlightenment, or the rise of capitalism and industrialism, or developments in modern science, or the college campus wars of the 1950s and 1960s - different versions of the narrative place the turning point at different places in history - somewhere, somehow, we in the West became a fundamentally, foundationally secular people. Somehow or other, God died.

In some, often progressive, tellings of this narrative, we have freed ourselves from the shackles of outmoded superstition and outdated servitude, liberating our lives from the auspices of oppressive institutions in order to celebrate the fullness of human potential in the absence of a divine overseer.

In other, more reactionary versions, we have fallen into spiritual acedia and decay, drifting listlessly across a disenchanted world, festering in our own moral decadence.

Both narratives are wrong

It's true that, at first glance, we are far less religious than we were 50 or 100 years ago. In the United States, at least, the numbers are striking.

• About a quarter of Americans now say that they're "religiously unaffiliated."
• Among young millennials and Generation Z - roughly, those born after 1985 - those numbers rise to a staggering 36 per cent.
• Among queer Americans, that percentage goes up to nearly half.
• In a full 20 US states, religious "nones" - as this group is often known - make up the single largest religious bloc.
• Just 22 per cent of Americans have their weddings in a religious house of worship as of 2017 - down from 41 per cent in 2009. And about 30 per cent say they don't want a religious funeral when they die.

But look a little closer and the numbers tell a far more complicated story.

The "religiously unaffiliated" may not be religious in the organised or formal sense, but - in the US at least - they're nevertheless deeply spiritually engaged.

• Seventy-two per cent of them say they believe in some form of a higher power, however nebulously described, and almost 20 per cent say they believe in the God of the Bible.
• Forty-six per cent of them talk to the higher power regularly.
• Thirteen per cent say it talks back.
• Almost half believe they've been protected by a higher power.
• Thirty-eight per cent say they believe in reincarnation.
• The religiously unaffiliated - whatever they are - aren't outright atheists or denizens of some disenchanted world.

Rather, they're spiritually interested and engaged - just doing so outside of the traditional religious channels.

Yet the story of our shifting contemporary religious landscape isn't just the story of the self-proclaimed "nones."

It's also a story of those who do identify as belonging to an established religious tradition, but whose beliefs, practices, and rituals suggest a more eclectic approach to faith.

As many as 30 percent of self-identified Christians, for example, say they believe in reincarnation - something nearly any orthodox Christian theologian would say is incompatible with even the most liberally construed iteration of church doctrine.

Of the self-proclaimed "spiritual but not religious" - as distinct from the "nones" - 37 percent identify as Protestant, and 14 per cent as Catholic. Simply looking at who ticks the "Christian" or "Jewish" box on a census form isn't enough: rather, many people may still affiliate with a tradition even as their internal theology and sense of self lie elsewhere.

The broader story of our shifting "enchanted" world, therefore, isn't just a story about secularism, disbelief and disaffiliation. Rather, it's a story of shifts in religious attitudes. Continue reading

• Tara Isabella Burton is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. Winner of the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for Travel Writing, she completed her doctorate in 19th century French literature and theology.
• Her latest book is "Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World.

On the one hand, they're disillusioned with their parents' religious traditions, which have failed to provide them with a coherent account of meaning and purpose in the world.

On the other hand, they're alienated from the conservatism of more hard-line denominations with stances on LGBTQ issues or sexuality that an increasingly progressive generation sees as at odds with millennials' core values.

These values hold that the self is an autonomous being, the self's desires are fundamentally good, and societal and sexual repression as not just undesirable but actively evil.

These millennials, which in my new book I called "Remixed Millennials," are at once attracted to moral and theological certainty — accounts of the human condition that claim totalizing truth or demand difficult adherence because the challenge is ultimately rewarding — and repulsed by traditions that set hard limits on personal, and particularly sexual or romantic, desire.

That, for better or for worse, is where corporations come in.

Increasingly, companies have recognized that there is a gap in the needs of today's Remixed: institutions, activities, philosophies and rituals that manage to be challenging and totalizing while also preserving millennials' need for personal freedom.

It's the dot-com bubble for spirituality, a free marketplace of innovation and religious disruption.

No sooner does something become a viral movement than an ingenious startup finds a way to re-create it at a more profitable price point.

Consumer-capitalist culture offers us not merely necessities but identities. Meaning, purpose, community and ritual can all — separately or together — be purchased on Amazon Prime.

As journalist Amanda Hess wrote in The New York Times, "Shopping, decorating, grooming and sculpting are now jumping with meaning. And a purchase need not have any explicit social byproduct — the materials eco-friendly, or the proceeds donated to charity — to be weighted with significance. Pampering itself has taken on a spiritual urgency."

Seeking to capitalize on the spiritual gap in the market, more and more brands are packaging and marketing religious and spiritual products. In 2019, you could buy witch-branded candles at Urban Outfitters, download Headspace or another meditation app to practice mindfulness on your morning commute, then pop in to SoulCycle, or CrossFit, or an Ashtanga yoga class on your lunch hour.

A 2018 study by Virtue, the branding-partnership arm of Vice Media, argued that spirituality was the "next big thing" in millennial-focused marketing. "We now think brands should take a step further," Vice's chief creative and commercial officer Tom Punch told attendees at a marketing festival, "thinking more broadly about what their role is in society and how they can truly be a force for good in people's lives."

In the early stages of its development, Facebook set up internal "compassion research days," during which the company brought in academics from Harvard and Yale to teach the benefits of Buddhist compassion, to employees working on the site's harassment-reporting tools.

Companies are also using political advocacy to sell themselves as moral arbitrators: See Nike's advertisements celebrating Colin Kaepernick's decision to "take a knee" in support of the Black Lives Matter movement or Chick-fil-A's donations to anti-LGBT-marriage groups (a practice the company ceased in 2019 after backlash from progressives).

These brands are selling not just products but values.

In so doing, they are creating moral universes, selling meaning as an implicit product and reframing capitalist consumption as a religious ritual — a repeated and intentional activity that connects the individual to divine purpose in a values-driven framework.

The rise of "woke capitalism" and its reactionary converse is endemic of the way today's new religions interface with the brands that so powerfully promote, reify and profit off them.

Of course, the rise of spiritual branding would be impossible without the third phenomenon that sets this Great Awakening apart from its predecessors: the dizzying transformations effected by internet culture.

The internet has also encouraged us, as consumers with a cornucopia of options demand a creative role in designing our spiritual experiences.

For a whole generation it has provided alternative communities, allowing people to find friends or partners who aren't merely like-minded, but almost identically minded. It disincentivizes compromise and conformity, even as it promises the bespoke ideal: people who think and feel and act just like you.

Long before the advent of the World Wide Web, Marshall McLuhan, often considered the father of media studies, envisioned a technological future characterized by what he called "retribalization."

New forms of electronic media — television, for example — were being touted as ushering in the "global village": a world in which disparate peoples would be united by the ideas and images newly available to them. McLuhan predicted that instead, we'd splinter into new, technology-driven "tribes."

As McLuhan rather bombastically (and somewhat offensively) told a Playboy interviewer in 1969, "The compressional, implosive nature of the new electric technology is retrogressing Western man back from the open plateaus of literate values and into the heart of tribal darkness."

McLuhan was prophetic.

From Harry Potter fans to Wiccans, skincare fanatics to political activists, we're increasingly able to use the power of both social media (Facebook) and public forums (Twitter, Reddit, 4chan) to find people with similar interests, philosophies and even sexual kinks.

But that's just one side of the coin.

The internet has also made us hungrier for individualization: for products, information and groups that reflect more exactly our personal sense of self.

There is a natural irony to all this.

The very qualities that most characterize modern technology — speed and ease of reproducibility — have also kindled a cultural backlash. Our spiritual profiles, like our Facebook profiles, need to be individualized.

Just look at the Ritual Design Lab, founded by designers Kursat Ozenc and Margaret Hagan.

Callers into the "ritual design hotline" (past clients have included big brands like Microsoft) tell the lab a bit about their community and needs, and the lab, in turn, designs a custom, nontheistic ritual.

"The new generation," Ozenc told The Atlantic's Sigal Samuel, "want(s) bite-size spirituality instead of a whole menu of courses."

In Ozenc's view, this is a good thing. "Design thinking can offer this," he continued on, "because the whole premise of design is human-centeredness. It can help people shape their spirituality based on their needs. Institutionalized religions somehow forget this — that at the center of any religion should be the person."

• Tara Isabella Burton is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. Winner of the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for Travel Writing, she completed her doctorate in 19th century French literature and theology.
• This article has been adapted from "Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World"

In an era when Kanye West runs gospel-inspired services, and megachurches, like Hillsong, release chart-topping hits, these ancient Christian traditions are, unexpectedly, having a moment.

And they're not just resonating with older generations, either.

Younger people are flocking to late-night Latin Mass — at least they were pre-COVID — and embracing Christian orthodoxy in online spaces.

So says Tara Isabella Burton, America-based author of the forthcoming book Strange Rites and a member of the self-proclaimed "Weird Christian" movement.

"The term is often applied to young, online Christians who embrace the elements of their faith that might be considered weird by the modern world," Burton explains.

Elements, she says, like the death and resurrection of Jesus.

"We don't have to explain away miracles or fit them into a modern scientific system, but actually embrace the strangeness of those ideas."

The allure of Weird Christianity goes beyond an espousal of the Bible. Burton says the otherworldly nature of religious rituals are also appealing to the young and disillusioned.

"There's a sense of enchantment that often comes with the pageantry," says Burton, who attends St Ignatius of Antioch in New York City, part of the Episcopalian or Anglo-Catholic tradition.

Burton says one of the factors uniting this community is their "punk"- like rejection of "contemporary secular capitalist culture" in favour of old-fashioned Christianity.

"[There's a] sense in which the choices we make are part of our personal brand," she says.

"Where we go to church, what newspapers we read, what we buy — all of these qualities together, make up this kind of identity through consumption.

"What it means to belong to a faith is never quite as crystal clear as what you believe in your heart, which itself may change from day to day."

'An element of drama'

While "Weird Christianity" may have a larger following in America, Australian places of worship are also attracting younger congregants through their history and "mystery".

Such is the case at Sydney's Christ Church St Laurence in Sydney's CBD.

Like St Ignatius, the church is part of the Anglo-Catholic or High Anglican strain of Christianity, which places a large emphasis on tradition.

The church's rector Daniel Dries says that while the congregation has an average age of 60, younger people are choosing to attend services that are rich with ancient rituals.

"It's not theatre, but there's certainly an element of drama," he says, pointing to the candles, incense and elaborate liturgical wear that feature in services.

"We sing music here that goes back to the Middle Ages — Gregorian chants — and renaissance choral music, so we rely on young people, who are very involved in those things."

Reverend Dries believes that Anglo-Catholicism has an "element of mystery about it" that can be missing from everyday life or other religious practices.

"Some of our young people come from a more evangelical tradition, which is sort of word-based and very long sermons or improvised prayers," he explains.

"I think for some people ... there sometimes comes a point where they can't deal with words anymore, and there's this genuine desire to enter into silence, mystery, music and ritual." Continue reading

• Tara Isabella Burton is a writer of fiction and non-fiction. Winner of the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for Travel Writing, she completed her doctorate in 19th century French literature and theology.

The decision, I'll admit, had something to do with the way that life has changed here in New York, indoors, where life consists almost entirely of writing and Zooming with family and friends — my mother, halfway across the world, in the morning; college friends in the U.K. in the afternoon; friends who live a block or two away in the evening.

Things move at once quickly and profoundly slowly.

But it was less impulsive or lockdown-driven than it may sound.

We had already planned for a quiet elopement at some point later this year, and, had we been married in our church, we would have been restricted to just two witnesses and our priest present anyway.

The lockdown only made us so much more aware of our dependence upon, and our fellowship with, people we might once have thought of as strangers.

Marrying in the park in the middle of quarantine, we inadvertently found ourselves something of an attraction for all of New York City, as spectacle-starved people, taking a moment outdoors to walk their dogs or jog or stroll stopped — at a safe social distance — to watch the ceremony.

• Old women cried out "mazel tov."
• Someone clapped while jogging without once breaking her stride.
• Golden retrievers off leashes bounded onto the lawn where we held our impromptu.
• Someone played Mendelssohn's Wedding March for us on their phone.
• When the priest asked our witnesses, as is custom, whether they would help and support us in our marriage vows, what seemed like half the city responded with "we will."

It is possible, of course, to read such an event as merely an aesthetic phenomenon — a bunch of bored, lonely New Yorkers looking for a good story to put on their Instagrams in the middle of a global pandemic.

But, dazed and delirious, trying not to stammer through my vows, I found in these strangers' presence something else: a sense that community — a localism born of our sense of bonds to one another — was at the heart of our collective sense of survival.

It is a strange thing to be married in the midst of a pandemic — stranger, too, to be married unexpectedly.

The ontological change that I believe takes place in marriage is an uncanny mirror of how, as I wrote a few weeks ago, we are more broadly dependent upon one another.

The sacrament of marriage, at least in the Christian tradition, is about the blurring of the boundaries of the self.

In becoming one flesh, as we are called to do, we abandon any pretence that we are fully autonomous individuals, at least in the sense that modern liberalism understands it.

Among the most affecting prayers that our priest read over us — part of the Book of Common Prayer's marriage rite — is that God "grant that their wills may be so knit together in your will."

The idea that we not only accept, but long for, pray for, wills that are not our own, is at the heart of my understanding of both Christianity and marriage.

We joyfully enter into an encounter with another human being — someone other, someone who is emphatically not simply an extension of our own selves, but rather an irreducible subject in their own right — and allow that encounter to transform us, to help us learn to love better. To do so demands, by definition, that we knit our will to the will of another human being, and of God.

Central Park was, for us that day, a fantastically liminal space.

The physical space in which I married my husband was, too, the space in which we entered into a moral community — those few passersby, at social distance, making a commitment to us; us, in our consciousness of this new world order, making a commitment to them and to their safety.

It was a kind of presence that was both akin to and separate from the digital space we reentered after the ceremony was over and we had gone back to our apartment when we got back on Zoom to tell our friends and family of our marriage.

We were, in both spaces, contingent upon both one another and the world around us: no less socially bonded to the people we loved for announcing the news over a webcam.

But the awareness, in Central Park, of what presence meant — the care with which we opened a cab door, with which we avoided strangers, with which we waved from a distance, with which we provided our witnesses with their own pens to sign the marriage license or with which my now-husband caught the bouquet thrown by one of our witnesses, who had brought it as a surprise gift for me and who could not hand it to us directly — was distinct to physical space.

Just being there, together, made us vulnerable: to one another and to the world around us.

It is true, I think, in every marriage rite. But ours made that particularly clear.

• Tara Isabella Burton received a doctorate in theology from Oxford University and is at work on a book about the rise of the religiously unaffiliated in America. First published in RNS and reproduced with permission.

Less than two weeks after I moved the majority of my things across New York City, I found myself occupying a new, though by now not unfamiliar, apartment.

Thanks to the restrictions of the lockdown, the geography of the place soon doubled as the contours of my entire physical world.

My idea of home — already, as someone who grew up a "third culture kid" and spent most of her 20s in transit as a travel writer, an ambiguous one — was transformed.

On the one hand, life has narrowed drastically. As bars and restaurants and businesses shuttered around us, as our streets emptied, as the decision to go for a walk or pick up a prescription or stop into a bodega for milk took on outsized weight, we have developed a routine characterized, in part, by seeming placelessness: a life that, but for our occasional grocery runs, could very well not be taking place in New York, a city that once for me was synonymous with being outside.

We cook. We bake. We work from home, writing side by side at the dining table.

We drink wine — rather too much of it in recent days.

We try to exercise with a set of sliders and a pair of weights.

Except for the constant fear of what the future might hold and the uncanny habits we've developed — wearing plastic gloves outside, using our sleeves to touch the elevator buttons — our day-to-day life feels strangely ordinary.

That placelessness, though, has fostered a different, though less instinctive, kind of rootedness.

We organize online classes, cocktail hours, play readings or "dinner dates."

We coordinate barre video workouts with friends and invite those who live in Paris or New Haven or California to drink a cocktail with us.

We watch our parish church's recorded prayers and services.

We video-chat with our parents: one set across the country, the other across the world.

As millennials, we as a generation are often accused of a certain moral and aesthetic rootlessness.

We order our household supplies from Amazon.

We read books on e-readers instead of physical copies bought from local bookshops.

The digital revolution has divorced place and people. Aided by increased internet speed the internet disembodies connection; our "tribes" are chosen.

But the fostering so many of us have done of online communities — through video-chatting platforms like Zoom, through cash apps like Venmo that allow us to tip our favourite bartenders or buy a video-chat session with a personal trainer — has revealed a different kind of rootedness: one based not in place, exactly, but in groups of people.

The more seemingly disembodied we become, the fewer links we have to our own geography, the more we become aware of the social bonds — of friendship, of chosen family, of affinity and care — that have come to define a different, but no less interdependent, notion of home.

I am a lifelong, proud New Yorker whose sense of being home has always been intertwined with place — in lieu of a gravesite, my grandmother has a memorial bench in Central Park and a plaque at her favourite restaurant; I take pride in the fact that the employees at my old bagel place know my breakfast order before I ask.

But I am more conscious now than ever that the digital revolution has divorced place and people.

Our sense of home is no less real for being diffuse.

The native lands that shape us are not necessarily those into which we are born — our hometowns, our birth parishes or synagogues or mosques, the communities we take as a given.

Increasingly, aided by the speed with which the internet makes disembodied connection possible, our "tribes" are chosen — people we meet through our hobbies, perhaps, or partners we find through dating apps (as 40%, annually, of couples who get together now do).

This is, of course, in part a disembodiment borne of privilege — our ability to stay indoors and to function with a degree of independence is predicated, in part, on the fact that my cohabitor and I have the kinds of jobs that allow for remote work.

But it also illustrates a broader truth about the boundaries between the "online" and the "offline" world, especially for millennials.

The rise of the "social distancing social life" makes it clearer than ever that a sense of place need not be physical. Home can be — and for now, must be — something you can experience through a webcam, darkly, if not always face to face.

• Tara Isabella Burton First Published in RNS. Republished with permission.