ABSTRACT
Traumatic experiences such as stillbirth and neonatal loss are often profoundly life altering, with reverberations into nearly every arena of existence. For parents, stillbirth or neonatal loss commonly triggers an existential crisis, raising questions of meaning, coherence of life narrative, and a struggle toward transcendence. This chapter analyses research on religion online and bereavement, describes how parents articulate the impact of the loss of a baby on their spiritual lives. In keeping with contemporary concern about over quantified, overstandardized, over-modeled, and overmanaged approaches to pain and death care in contemporary medicine, this research does not view bereavement primarily as a problem to be professionally managed, nor as a pathology or potential pathology. Finding inadequate support for bereavement among their physical communities in general and their religious communities in particular, parents who have experienced stillbirth or neonatal loss often look to the Internet.
