When I teach cultural apologetics, I open each class session with a segment I call “Making the Modern Mind.” We discuss a technological artifact from throughout history and how it changed culture, including religious life. Artifacts include movable type, the cotton gin, and electricity. One of our most important sessions covers the smartphone.
You’ve probably had one for the last 10 or even 15 years. And you know it’s useful in various ways, like the Swiss Army knife of the internet age. Beyond making your life somewhat easier, and somewhat more distracted, have you considered the story it tells? Has ubiquitous access to the internet made wisdom easier to attain? More attractive to pursue?
Samuel James explores these fascinating and vital questions in his new book, Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age (Crossway). Samuel is the associate acquisitions editor at Crossway and author of a newsletter, Digital Liturgies, where he covers Christianity, technology, and culture.
In this book, he summarizes the story of the internet age: “The digital liturgies of the web and social media train us to invest ultimate authority in our own stories and experiences as they separate us from the objective givenness of the embodied world.” To be more specific, we become users known by words, pictures, and shares instead of flesh and blood, voices, and facial expressions.
Samuel explains this story isn’t accidental. It was explicit from the architects of our age. According to Samuel, they told “a story of humanity wherein salvation consists of overcoming givenness itself, curating a custom existence, and achieving freedom from boredom, limitation, ignorance, and even death.”
We need biblical wisdom, then, to understand and resist these cultural narratives so we can thrive in our time. We need God’s help to love him and love our neighbors as ourselves. Samuel joined me on Gospelbound to help us understand more of the digital story and to offer advice to parents, pastors, and even the editor in chief of The Gospel Coalition.
The Gospel Coalition