As the tragedy of the Korean missionaries remind us so forcefully, being a missionary is fraught with complexity, confusion, outcomes and consequences. One of the most frequently asked questions about the situation in Afghanistan is “What were they thinking?” As one commentator put it so eloquently — “Out of their minds for God” — the answer isn’t a clear cost-benefit analysis easily crunched by computer or logic. But that doesn’t mean we can’t and shouldn’t ask more about the missionary function, purpose or potential.

Perhaps one way of thinking about the questions is to step outside the deadly drama of Afghanistan, where the purpose of the missionary has become subsumed into a larger argument about the course of the war, the battle with the Taliban and the idea of negotiating for hostages with a group occasionally branded as the enemy or terrorists. And there is no better place than the recent call by a Jesuit scholar for the order to begin missionary work in the online virtual reality world of Second Life.

Jesuit Antonio Spadaro, in the Italian journal La Civilta Cattolica, has written a lengthy and forcefully argued call for Catholics in general and Jesuits in particular to consider the need for cyber missionary work. His reasoning seems simple. Since Second Life is a real social phenomenon, it should be treated as such, which includes acknowledging the issue of spirituality in the virtual world, confronting the question of faith among avatars, which are the representations of real people in the virtual world, and accepting that such a wrestling with reality leads to inescapable conclusions.

{sidebar id=2} If you have never visited Second Life, it is worth the journey if simply to understand the mutations taking place in social relations in the world today. It is a virtual, 3-D world that has been operating on the web for four years now. Its residents, or members, create the universe of Second Life. There are close to nine million residents around the world and the number is rising. It has its own virtual economy that spills over to the “real” world with remarkable frequency. Within the last week, the organizers of Second Life felt compelled to ban gambling because real debts were being incurred in cyberspace. Large corporations, including publishers and music companies, have Second Life presences with concerts, readings, album releases and book launches becoming more common. Politicians and political parties are establishing themselves online. The science fiction world of William Gibson and the cyber-punk science fiction genre of the early 1980s is firming up every day.

As Spadaro rightly observes, and he is not alone, where people gather faith is not only not far behind but also actually right alongside. There are already a score of invented religions at work in Second Life and many faiths are slowly but surely establishing a foothold. According to the most recent statistics, Second Life residents aren’t a church-attending group, online at least, and spend much of their virtual activity in concerts, encounters, relationships and other flights of imagination. But if people are spending time in a created reality, what should any one faith group do about it?

What Spadaro is suggesting is what Jesuits have always done. He has taken note of the new and the unusual and attempted to find a way of squaring what the emerging media demand of those compelled to bear witness to evangelize. The question is, can this be done in a way that is true to the aim of the missionary?

(Kavanagh is a senior producer at CBC Radio in Toronto.)