A Figured World Study of the Online Faith Discourse of a Philippine Catholic Parish Facebook Page

This sociolinguistic study examines the Facebook page of a Catholic parish in the Philippines as a figured world. The figured world framework is a way of viewing a particular locus of interaction as a product of social and cultural construction. This lens, which has been widely used to examine education contexts, is applied in this study to the novel context of online religious community interactions. By using the figured world approach to discourse analysis, this research extends the view of social media for religious purposes beyond its usual attractions of entertainment, self-documentation, and self-expression. This paper argues that Facebook, as a platform for the digital staging of Catholic parish life, is an important space for the discursive (re)construction of church purpose, participation, interaction, and identity, with potentially important implications to the Catholic Church’s missiological trajectory.