technology

Culture

Looking For Answers at the Oscars: A Guide to This Year’s Contenders

By

The top films for 2010—especially those up for this Sunday’s awards—leave most of the species-specific questions behind. Instead this year’s crop reflects anxieties (as well as promises) about who we are and who we might be becoming in and as humans, in our own skins—never mind the “prawns” or “Na’vi.” Questions provoked by this year’s films include those concerning the nature of our selves in connection and collision with our families, our larger social institutional entanglements, and our own bodies. The other key theme, effecting each of the others, had to do with the ways new media technology is inserting itself into our intimate lives, and changing our identities, both public and private.

Read More
Culture

Turn Off, Slow Down, Drop In: The Digital Generation Reinvents the Sabbath

By

As National Day of Unplugging looms (it begins a week from today) I hope we all can agree that taking time away from the frenzy of everyday life is a good thing. And pausing to reflect on the role of technology in our lives is important at a time when social technologies in particular are becoming increasingly integrated into daily life with effects that we are just beginning to describe and understand. But I do have to wonder if the keen, even if not hostile, focus on technology as such misses the phenomenological, relational, and spiritual mark just a bit.  

Read More
(A)theologies

Confession Fail: iPhone App Controversy Muddies the Sacramental Waters

By

The Confession app relies on a certain level of theological understanding, liturgical compliance, and spiritual will that we might be hard-pressed to find in even a relatively sophisticated believer. This is not entirely a failure of catechism or human will, I suspect. Rather, it is a continuation of what I have seen as a failure of mainline Catholic and Protestant pilgrims into new digital territories to grasp the social nature of new media.

Read More
(A)theologies

Chilean Mine Rescue: Largest Global Spiritual Event Ever?

By

One wonders how religious leaders might have exercised a more meaningful presence in the event as it unfolded and was engaged across a global digital landscape. As I scanned the emerging Facebook communities throughout the day and monitored Twitter feeds and news site comments, it was clear that few religious leaders were participating in what has to have been the most significant global spiritual conversation that has ever taken place on Earth.

Read More