These aren't your grandma's devotions. Young adult Catholics are using non-traditional ways to get in touch with their spiritual side.

It's 11 p.m., and 31-year-old Tara Turner is wearing cotton pajamas, lying on her bed, deep in prayer. Her hands aren't folded; they're clasping a pink Game Boy.

As she digs to the center of the earth, attacking monsters en route, Turner communes with God.

"I pray as I play," she says. "When you've got your fingers and your eyes focused on this little critter on the screen, then your mind is more open to hearing God."

The medium is powerful for the Oklahoma native. "The only time I hear God speaking just as much," Turner says, "is when I pray the rosary."

Welcome to the prayer lives of young adult Catholics. Here, electronic monsters align with Hail Marys and digital pictures coalesce with the Stations of the Cross. Their prayer is startlingly expansive, a hybrid of the ancient and the high-tech.

It's a popular lamentation today that young Catholics don't pray. And research reinforces it. In 2004 the National Opinion Research Center found that 18- to 30-year-olds pray less than every older segment, while Catholics pray less than other denominations. The spiritual prognosis for young Catholics appears grim.

But there's more to the story, insists sociologist Dean Hoge, who interviewed hundreds of American Catholics ages 20 to 39 for his book Young Adult Catholics: Religion in the Culture of Choice (University of Notre Dame Press) and has taught thousands at Catholic University of America in Washington. Young Catholics pray in a wide variety of ways, Hoge says, some of which don't trigger affirmative survey responses. Don't dismiss the church's youngest members just because they don't enlist St. Anthony when they misplace their iPods.

"Young adult Catholics in America are unlike any in the past," Hoge says. "They're more educated, more affluent, better traveled, more culturally sensitive, more in touch with non-Catholics than ever in American history."

Each of these facts influences their prayer habits. For example, well-educated young Catholics yearn to infuse spirituality with intellectualism.

That yearning is evidenced in Cory Rath, 30, from Iowa City, Iowa, who read the biography of St. Ignatius and then bookmarked a website with daily Ignatian prayers, sacredspace.ie. "The intellectual component grounds my prayer life in experience and helps me to apply insight gained in prayer," Rath says.

Then there are young adults who "pray the news," incorporating the daily news headlines into online prayer. It is as spiritual as it is intellectual, uniting the news junkie and poet.

East meets West

In Catholic colleges across the country, theology and religious studies departments are offering more courses off Catholicism's beaten path. The movement has compelled Catholic students to view spirituality more broadly.