The e-Word of God

There are nearly one million e-books available for purchase on Amazon.com alone. One quick click on the “religion & spirituality” genre reveals that there are nearly 100,000 books and more than 30,000 on Christianity alone — more than any other subgenre in this category.

For today’s younger generation, e-readers and other electronic books are a new and crucial resource for accessing religious texts and testimonials of fellow Catholics.

As a relatively new owner of a Kindle, Amazon’s version of the e-reader, I have experienced how online books and texts can help young adults further develop a relationship with God. E-books, like physical books, allow readers to share the author’s journey and experiences of faith.

However, e-books allow for greater accessibility to the audience in comparison to physical books: comparably lower prices, the ability to download a text to various devices and the capabilities to find new and exciting texts on your device.

A voracious reader, I value the power of reading as an educational tool, both academically and in my faith life. A few months ago, I decided to take my chances on the Kindle. This device seemed the perfect way to explore new types of texts and old favourites at a low cost to me and available to purchase or sample 24 hours a day.

I now have more than 230 books on my Kindle which I can read at any time — whether I am lying in bed, in between classes or even in line at the grocery store.

Among the titles I own are Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back, How to Stay Christian in College and Not a Fan: Becoming a Completely Committed Follower of Jesus and other memoirs and testimonials of the faithful.

With the purchase of my e-reader, the accessibility of books about faith has increased significantly. For the price of a single physical copy of one of these books, I can buy five e-books. I can read a chapter of one book at work and download it immediately if I decide I like it. I don’t have to worry about thousands of pages taking up space on my shelves — only thousands of bytes on a handheld device.

But it’s not just the Kindle, Sony Reader or Kobo that allows readers to view these electronic texts.

Virtually everyone under the age of 30 owns some type of device on which e-books can be read: smartphones, a BlackBerry, iPhones, iPods, laptops, desktop computers, iPads and so on. Reading applications can be purchased and used to view thousands of pages.

We use these devices to communicate with our friends, our families and the international community. But we seem to often overlook how our technological devices can help us develop spiritually. With all these resources for living a fuller life with God literally at our fingertips, the electronic world may be the best way to connect and relate to fellow Catholics through our experiences.

(Keating, 23, is an English literature and German culture student at Memorial University in St. John’s, Nfld. Read her Q&A at youthspeaknews.org)