It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution -- Oscar Wilde

Frank Warren collects secrets.

Bored in his successful-but-monotonous day job running a document delivery business, he often sat pondering more meaningful things he could do outside work and came up with the idea.

"I printed up hundreds of self-addressed postcards and gave them out to strangers in the D.C. area and asked them to write down a secret and design the postcard with artwork," says Mr. Warren, 44, of Germantown, Md.

And the PostSecret project was born. The only stipulations were that the secret had to be true and never before revealed. Within a month, he had received 150 postcards from artistic, anonymous confessors, and he transformed the postcards into an exhibit for a local weekend art show.

Today -- about four years, 250,000 postcards, four New York Times best-selling books, and a traveling art exhibition later -- the PostSecret project is an international pop cultural phenomenon. It includes the blog www.PostSecret.com, with more than 186 million visitors. His site and others like it are evidence of America's confessional culture, which has grown in the Internet age.

"When I stopped passing out the postcards, I thought the project would end, but I tapped into something full of mystery and of wonder, and it took on a life of its own," he says.

Mr. Warren, who regularly speaks on college campuses about the project before capacity crowds, will be at Clarion University at 7 p.m. Thursday in the Gemmell Multi-Purpose Room. At each event, he shares a secret of his own and attendees often share some, too.

He receives about 1,000 postcards a week and posts 20 new postcards to the Webby award-winning PostSecret blog each Sunday. There are PostSecret Web sites in French, German, Spanish and Korean. Hundreds of video montages of postcards set to music can be viewed on YouTube.com.

"What I tried to do was create a safe, non-judgmental place where people could share those very personal secrets that involve emotions and feelings and embarrassments and love and losses and do it in a way that they wouldn't receive any negative social feedback," says Mr. Warren, whose latest book of PostSecrets is "A Lifetime of Secrets."

Here's a sample of secrets he has received:

• "Changing my car battery with my own hands gave me a greater sense of accomplishment than anything in medical school ever has."

• "I check his underwear to make sure he isn't cheating ... Again."

• "If I fall in love again and marry, my future husband will be indebted to you. Thank you for being an incredible first love."

• "I've gone to bed hungry so many more times as an adult than I remember as a child."

• "On the back of this is my suicide note ... which I'm not going to use."

The PostSecret project has helped raise awareness about and money for the National Suicide Hotline (1-800-SUICIDE), and the National Mental Health Association has honored Mr. Warren and PostSecret for moving "the cause of mental health forward."

Mr. Warren hopes the messages -- which can be painfully candid, adult, shocking, sad, angry, poignant or sweet -- not only inspire people to share secrets with others but also to face the secrets they're hiding from themselves. He hopes the postcards help people become more aware of the connections they share with others.

"Each one of us has a secret that would break your heart," he says.

Today's confessional culture is rooted in secret sharing that has evolved through history, from religious confession to modern psychotherapy's emergence as "The Talking Cure" in the 19th century.

"The idea was repressing one's innermost secrets actually made you sick, and putting it out in the open air was perhaps one way of making you better," says Robert Thompson, a popular-culture professor at Syracuse University.

Then came the era of TV talk shows -- from Phil Donahue and Maury Povich to Oprah and Jerry Springer -- when people were willing to air their dirty laundry on television and be seen by millions.

Within a couple of generations, people have become much more comfortable with the controlled sharing of private thoughts and images, in part, because of the Internet, Dr. Thompson said.

The anonymity of the Web and universality of the secrets can be beneficial, says Mark Lepore, an assistant professor in Chatham University's counseling psychology program.

"People often have the distressing idea that they are alone with many disturbing thoughts and secrets that only they could have," he says. "Reading other people's disclosures affirms the fact that their secret thoughts and feelings are normal and not pathological."

Among other similar sites is True Wife Confessions. As a joke, Dawn Rouse posted to her personal blog a list of 10 things she has failed to tell her husband during their marriage. The list proved so popular with her blog readers -- who wished they had a place where they could vent and anonymously share marital confessions -- that in June 2006, she started the blog at truewifeconfessions.blogspot.com/, which has new posts each Monday.

Some of the posts are cringe-inducing and extremely adult. Many are bitter or borne of great pain. Some are surprising and downright cruel; others are kind.

"Within each confession, there's a lot of information about how hard it is to be married and a lot of information about the stuff we never necessarily even talk about to our girlfriends," says Ms. Rouse, 38, who is working on her doctorate at McGill University in Montreal. "There have been some I've found troubling, personally and morally, but I try to remember, everyone's truth is different."

• Confession No. 051: "I hate your family. Really. I hate most of your friends, too."

• Confession No. 2239: "The fact that I can tell you to trim your nose hair and eyebrows and you don't get mad at me makes me love you all the more."

• Confession No. 2675: "Dear Hubby, When you wake up in the morning and say that your head hurts, or feel like I have been hitting you all night ... your [sic] right. I smack your jaw shut over and over again until you stop snoring ... I also push you over so that you will stop ... so those pains in your back are really caused by me!"

• Confession No. 2623: "There are many times that you drive me crazy. Like stick-a-fork-in-your-jugular crazy. But when the [stuff] hits the fan, you have my back 100 percent. And for that, I am forever grateful."

Marriage is difficult. Ms. Rouse hopes she, too, has created a safe place where women can vent and learn from each other about negotiating their relationships.

Some women who've sent in confessions have contacted her later, saying they just needed to see it written down to clearly see what they needed to say to their spouse.

Mr. Warren has had people contact him later, too, saying a secret was true when they submitted it, but now it isn't. And that's OK.

"The power of the secrets and what people are sharing is more dynamic than simply being true or false," he says. "When you're talking about personal revelations and human stories, you're talking about different layers of truths. Usually, those secrets come from a kernel of truth somewhere."