It has been strange, yet illuminating, to read this book, written before the COVID-19 pandemic, at a time when so many aspects of our lives were forced to become virtual. Schmidt provides not merely a theological evaluation of the internet, but a constructive proposal that the category of the virtual provides unique opportunities for the life of the church in our times and reveals the dynamics of absence and presence at the heart of communion with God and with one another. In dialogue with scholarship on the internet, history, sociology, and theology, Schmidt provides a theology of the internet and not only about the internet, demonstrating its potential sacramentality of grace, communion, and the divine.

The book begins with two chapters of literature review, outlining past theological treatments of the internet and magisterial documents on media and communication. These chapters provide necessary context and will be of use to students in understanding the sweep of past discourse on the internet and media. The more constructive treatments of virtuality and sacramentality that follow are the real heart of the book. Schmidt makes two fundamental arguments. First, Schmidt shows that virtuality, and its dialectic of absence and presence through mediation, is not a recent invention, limited only to the internet. Rather, as she writes, “Virtuality as a mode of cultural production and participation is very, very old” (59), and in fact “a constitutive part of the sacramental and ecclesial theology of the Catholic tradition” (19). Schmidt points to medieval religious women's virtual pilgrimages, Paul's letters to the early churches, and modern reconstructions of Lourdes grottoes in the United States as three of the many examples of Christian virtuality beyond the internet. These forms of historic and popular sacramentality, she argues, and the more formal sacramentality of the Eucharist, mediate presence and absence: these “texts, images, and objects … make gracious realities present, while at the same time speaking to their absence” (76). The virtual logic at the heart of the internet, then, provides less a novum to be critiqued or feared, and instead reveals the dynamic of presence and absence at the heart of Christian life; far from being necessarily negative, basically neutral, or a possible secondary good, the internet provides, Schmidt suggests, a “pedagogy of absence” (145) that unveils the dynamic of absence and presence at the heart of the Christian worldview. Although specifically addressed only in the concluding chapter, Louis-Marie Chauvet's theology of the sacraments’ ability to mediate absence and presence through symbolic exchange appears to be an underlying engine of the project as a whole.

Schmidt extends these insights further by exploring how the virtual secondary spaces that the internet opens for the practices of communion might provide a remedy for some of the difficulties faced in contemporary US parish life. She summarizes sociological and theological reflection upon the suburbanization of US Catholic experience and argues that nostalgia for an all-encompassing local parish community life, real or imagined, neglects the reality of current parish eucharistic practice. Because the parish often exists in isolation from secondary spaces of communion, “The Eucharist has become a precious, exceptional moment of social unity in an otherwise divided social existence” (143). The internet, therefore, by creating “spaces in which to practice what the Eucharist teaches us” (143) outside of the logic of consumer capitalism, provides an avenue for growth in virtual, that is, real, communion. It has the potential to fill the void in secondary ecclesial spaces necessary for living out a eucharistic life, and internet cultures of reciprocal symbolic exchange, often rooted in a desire for communion, have much yet to contribute to ecclesial communion.

Schmidt's work is impressive in the range of sources and voices she has consulted, though that sometimes limits the length at which Schmidt can discuss any particular topic, and one hopes that in future monographs and articles some of the ideas present in concentrated form can be expanded and further elaborated. Although a specialized text, individual chapters would make excellent additions to graduate and upper-level undergraduate syllabi. This book should be read not only by theologians interested in media and communications, but also by those interested in contemporary US Catholic pastoral life, ecclesiology, and sacramental theology.