One site, launched by the nondenominational Flamingo Road Church in Cooper City this Easter, is ivescrewedup.com. The 6,500-member church created the site as part of a 10-week series on the ways people make mistakes — in marriage, parenting, finances — and can learn from them.
"I think it helps people understand . . . that we're not here to point out people's screw-ups, that we're here to help them," Pastor Troy Gramling told The Miami Herald. "The church is made of skin and flesh and people that have made mistakes."
A 23-year-old man who posted on the site told The Herald in a telephone interview that posting his sin "was very cathartic." The anonymity of the site is key to its appeal, he said.
Janet Sternberg, associate chairwoman of the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University in New York, told the newspaper that online confessionals are a natural outgrowth of Internet chat rooms ''where people have this habit of telling secrets to strangers,'' as well as blogs and MySpace pages.
But, so far, more people are reading confessions than posting them.
The Flamingo Road Church gets about 1,000 hits a day, with about 200 online admissions.