the “third spaces” concept has been central to the finding religion in the media project. as developed by hoover and echchaibi, this concept serves as an interpretive tool to highlight what we call a “thickening” of the religious experience beyond dichotomous definitions of both religion and media categories. digital spaces have opened up opportunities to theorize the production of meaning across hybrid spaces. digital media reflect and narrativize life experiences and the center has done so by looking specifically at case studies of the way religion and the religious is articulated and contested online. the research is framed around the novelty of technologies that leads us to adopt a hierarchical indexing of what constitutes an authentic experience of belonging and belief, outside of dichotomies of traditional/modern, physical/digital, and real/proximal embodied experience. the impulse to define how and why we communicate, drawing boundaries between various technological media leads to problematic understandings of complex user identities. the third spaces concept argues that theories of ritual, religion, media and communication benefit from an analysis of how meaning is produced and performed at the borderlines of a complex ecosystem of media ensembles and hybrid spaces.