Everyone's had the skeevy friend request on a social networking site from someone they don't know well. But what about a request from someone you know very well, but prefer not to hang out with in a given digital realm?

USA Today (via Howard Rheingold's SmartMobs) points to the case of Deb Levine, executive director at Internet Sexuality Information Services in Oakland, who faced a tough decision when her rabbi's wife added her on LinkedIn:

Then the wife of Levine's rabbi asked to "friend" her on the site, and Levine felt compelled to say yes.

Now Levine has mixed her religious life with her
work life online, something she never intended to do. And she worries
that having a personal contact listed among business associates will
make her look less professional.

"I'm using LinkedIn to further my professional
projects," Levine says. "There's just no way (the rabbi's wife) could
be helpful in that. I don't talk about my religion and religious
affiliations" while at work.

Levine's quandary raises some important issues about where religion fits into the scheme of social networking, including sites like Friendster, Facebook, or that other one that Darth Murdoch. Social networking norms also complicate how users interact with smaller, more specialized sites that are accessible to the public, including sites built around cultural spheres -- such as religion -- that tend to be volatile. (At least one such site for riffraff comes to mind.)

In addition to Jewcy, so far I've toyed with a professional network for my career,
a private blog for family and friends, started a new social networking
account, lapsed with an old one and tried out social
bookmarking.

In the process, I've grown less concerned with my digital footprint.
But I've grown more concerned about which footprints I allow my different
friends, family, acquaintances and colleagues to follow. Users might not always consider it kosher to let all of their friends into a specialized social networking space. I'm sure that if Levine was also a member of a social networking site for say, single Jews, she might think twice about importing all of her LinkedIn contacts.

Online social networking seems to work best at its two extremes.
Facebook and the rest work splendidly as general spaces. And the
most advanced, forward-thinking online magazines -- sites I like to
call digital magazine communities -- make the most of their readerships
by capturing their activity online, beyond the mere
consumption of content. In other words, the larger platforms are trying to specify their features while the smaller platforms are trying to broaden them. After all, every social networking site wants to be profitable, and profits depend on two things: audience and activity.

In the grand tradition of technology causing problems that only technology creates, this doesn't make things easier.

Call it networking creep: if online social networking works best at its two extremes, does
that mean we all need X number of specialized digital magazine
communities in order to satisfy our particular digital craves? There's
obviously a terminal limit, if for no other reason than there are only
so many hours in a week to maintain one's spot in every community.

Of course none of this solves Levine's quandary. Then again, I'm a little bit less concerned with users who worry about religious friends and acquaintances -- oh, that pesky rabbi's wife! -- creeping into other social networking sites, and much more interested by the opposite scenario. Should religious networking sites make an effort to blockade non-religious users?

Put differently, who owns the right to define the community?

As campaign season heats up, the candidates'
"religious beliefs" will increasingly become part of the American conversation. The media isn't likely to be of much help. If Iraq is your issue, you can count on an endless parade of articles describing just about every aspect of the war; the same won't be true of the candidates religious beliefs and practices.

I understand why religion reporters so frequently give up the beat, and why their story ideas meet with skepticism from editors. Because while reporters are forced to think about the outside world, religion forces us to consider the interior world.

Consider how a reporter goes about his beat. If it's education, then he visits the school district and reports on what teachers and staff and students tell him. But if it's religion, going to a church, mosque or temple doesn't work quite as well. Private conversations with God aren't all that accessible to reporters. The First Amendment gives reporters the freedom to ask questions of whomever they please; it doesn't bestow magical mind-reading powers.

Take abortion, for example. How often does a reporter really attempt to get inside the head of a Christian evangelist pro-life advocate? Or Palestinian-Israeli relations. How often does a reporter ask a person in that dispute, "What do your prayers with God tell you about this situation?"

Very rarely. And that's because editors are bred to treat with skepticism any reporter's attempt to get inside a source's head. This works in 90 percent of journalism because reporters and editors have to guard against the possibility that the source is bullshitting them. And more often than not, that type of maneuver can be checked against empirical, verifiable, external facts and evidence. Not so with religion. If a source tells a reporter that she's voting for Huckabee or Edwards because her prayers guided her in that direction, how could a reporter possibly call bullshit?

As this process unfolds, I'd love to see reporters really dig into religious issues. Not so much what the candidates believe, but what Americans believe -- remembering, also, that no belief at all is still a belief in something. Because the campaign offers a high-profile opportunity for journalists to get it right, to set the agenda, to bridge the interior to the external. People vote not always for what they suspect will affect their surroundings, but also for what they hold closest to their souls. I've seen countless stories so far on how Iraq, the economy, and health care are helping voters sort out their presidential preferences. But I haven't seen a single story where reporters really interrogate a number of Americans about their religious beliefs.

Good reporting, no matter the subject, challenges our assumptions and adds nuance to our understanding of the world we live in. Informed, accessible coverage of "religious beliefs" must be part of of this process.

For the first time while living in California (been here a year and a half now), I finally attended Mass. The wife and I went on Christmas Eve, joining all the families with sullen college-student children crashing at home for the holidays and attending a holiday Mass as part of the deal.

When people say that they are agnostic, that they don't believe humans can ever really know anything about God, are they just being apathetic?

When people say that they are atheistic, are they zealously making a stand when they should be tempering their beliefs with some humble agnosticism?

And what of the believers, the faithful? If they're being apathetic about their religion, are they committing a greater offense than if they took a spirited, principled stand as atheists, or possibly even agnostics?

Currently reading: Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. Which shall forever make me think of one movie scene and one movie scene only throughout the history of cinema. I'm pulling this one out of the depths of my late-high-school and college-age memory, so forgive any inaccuracies:

CHET: At least, those are my thoughts. I'd be curious to hear yours.