If you want to listen to my interview on the Son Rise Morning Show from this morning, you can hear it online at:
September 14th Son Rise Radio Show Archive
You need to let the entire file load and then cue the audio almost to the end of the file to catch my segment. (The show airs from 6am to 9am and I was on at 8:40am.)
To see the article referenced in the interview, click here.
I’ll be on the Son Rise Morning Show on Cincinnati’s Sacred Heart Radio (740AM) on Monday the 14th at 8:40AM. If you live in Cincinnati, be sure to tune in (did you hear that, Mom?). You can also stream the broadcast at sacredheartradio.com.
I’ll be discussing how new technologies like ebooks impact our ability to understand the Bible. You can see some of my thoughts on this topic here.
Be sure to listen in!
Episodes of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” would often show Captain Picard sitting in his office reading from an actual book – not a tablet or computer screen, but a real paper book. I think the writers of the series wanted to show Picard as an intellectual and deep thinker, and they knew having him just read from a tablet device would not give off that impression. But they knew that a book would surely show that the good Captain had a great mind.
I thought of that when I read this quote:
There are modes of learning and thinking that at the moment are only available from actual books. There is a kind of deep-dive, meditative reading that’s almost impossible to do on a screen. Without books, students are more likely to do the grazing or quick reading that screens enable, rather than be by themselves with the author’s ideas.
- William Powers, author of a paper published at Harvard called “Hamlet’s Blackberry: Why Paper is Eternal” (source)
I find in my own experience that this statement rings very true. When I try to read something on a screen, I find myself more often than not “grazing,” not reading. My mind cannot focus as deeply on screen text and I usually cannot stay with the material very long. Yet when I read an actual (paper) book, I am much more able to do the “deep-dive” reading that Powers describes. This is why if I find something on the Internet that I really want to digest, I print it out.
This brings up an interesting question that all Christians should contemplate: how will this affect our biblical literacy? The Bible is the most important text we as Christians have in our possession, and it contains the story of God’s unbelievable love for His people. Yet the Bible is a challenging text to read – it consists of widely varying genres from quite diverse cultures (diverse from our own and even at times from each other). There is no question that the Bible requires the “deep-dive, meditative reading” that Powers says is “almost impossible to do on a screen.” So what does this mean? If we as a society transform into an entirely screen-based reading society, will our knowledge of the Scriptures begin to fade? Will we be able to delve deeply into the Word of God? Powers says that only paper allows a reader to be able to “be by themselves with the author’s ideas.” What happens when the author is God?
One could argue that our inability to do deep reading on the screen is simply due to it being a new media, and that future generations will be able to read meditatively even from a screen, as that will be the only reading that they will know. But what if that is not the case? What if the human mind simply cannot process words from a screen as well as it processes words on paper?
Can the Word become flesh in pixel form?
Over at Catholic Exchange, Mark Shea discusses one of the most important questions of our day: the underlying philosophy of Star Trek. In an article entitled “The Stupid Prime Directive“, Mark addresses why warp technology will turn our race into a bunch of “leotard-clad UN conflict resolution counselors” and other vital issues. These are important topics and I urge everyone to read his article.
Now, I must admit: as a child, I loved Star Trek. The original series would run every night on a local station (in repeats) and I got to the point where I knew what episode it was from the first 30 seconds of the show. Whereas I never became a “Trekker” (I have never owned any pointy ears and I haven’t tried to learn the Klingon language), the idea of space travel and meeting aliens of all types fascinated me, as it did many young people of my era (especially young boys).
As I got older, I continued to watch the later Star Trek shows, such as The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. I lost interest with Voyager and then the latest incarnation, Enterprise, didn’t appeal to me at all.
The more I watched the show, however, the more I began to question some of the fundamental assumptions behind it. How was it that humanity had overcome some of its base vices, such as greed? (There is no money in the 24th century, after all). How was it possible that the show revolved around conflict of some kind – including conflict between individual humans – yet humanity had somehow achieved peace and harmony on a macro scale? And then when the show tried to explain when this harmony broke out – with the advent of warp technology – I couldn’t help but laugh, for here was a truly modern religion: there is no Fall and it will be technology that will save us.
Although I still enjoy sometimes watching Star Trek (at least TNG and DS9), I have come to see its underlying assumptions about humanity to be more fantastic than the idea of warp travel and thousands of other alien races.
The Wall Street Journal recently had a wonderful article about the dangers of modern technology, in which the author reflects on how technology causes us to speed up our lives unnecessarily. Too many of us are now living life at a breakneck speed, and there is no question that this could have dramatic consequences for us as individuals and as a culture. This is a good example of how technology often changes our lives in ways that were unintended and perhaps unwelcome.
Now I’m sure that there are some readers of this blog who find it a bit ironic when I write about the dangers of technology on our spiritual, mental and physical lives. After all, this is a blog. And I’m on facebook, for goodness sake. How can I write against technology if I obviously embrace it?
I don’t consider myself against technology. Instead, I like to think of myself as deliberate about technology. What I mean by that is that I do not think we should embrace every technology as it is released unthinkingly. Instead, we need to deliberately evaluate each technology on its own merits (and demerits) and determine if it truly helps our lives in a meaningful way. This deliberation should go beyond the surface impact of a technology to the more subtle and possibly harmful ways a technology changes how we live.
For example, in the 1950′s the television was seen as a marvelous invention that would unite families and educate our youth. Does anyone still seriously believe that this is the case? No technology has probably done more to divide families and dumb-down children than the boob tube. My own family decided a few years ago to get rid of our television. We found that, on the whole, it was more detrimental to our family life than it was beneficial, as we definitely watched more television than we really wanted to due to the easy nature of being able to just flip on the boob tube and be lobotomized by its programming. Not having a TV in the house was a great decision, as it has freed up a great deal of time for more enriching (and family-uniting and educational) pursuits, and frankly, no one misses it.
Note that I am NOT saying that TV is immoral. There is no technology that is inherently immoral – it is how one uses a technology that determines the morality of the action. However, that does not mean that every technology must be embraced by those striving for holiness. As Catholics, we should evaluate each new technology and see how it impacts our own personal path to holiness. Is it causing us to waste our time? Is it leading us to view immoral actions? Is it subtly harming our ability to think deeply? Just because a technology is not inherently immoral doesn’t mean that it is healthy for us as Catholics looking to be saints.
Each technology decision we make should be just that: a decision. No one has to be involved with blogs, facebook, television, twitter or any other technology. One can live a fruitful, holy and even evangelical life without any of them (let me tell you from experience: one-on-one personal contact, not modern technology, is still the best form of evangelization). There are many marvelous things available via these new technologies, but none are required for a holy life. Of course, these are individual, prudential decisions. What might be spiritual dangerous for one person might be fine – and even uplifting – for another. But I do think too many people unthinkingly embrace new technologies without determining if it will help them in their walk with Christ.
We as Catholics should be striving relentlessly for holiness, so whereas reading a simple tweet or blog post or facebook update might be harmless, it might lead us to a situation where following such updates begin to consume a spiritually (and mentally and physically) unhealthy amount of our time. Let us be deliberate about the technology we consume and make sure we spend more time directly interacting with our family, friends, neighbors and even strangers than we do on our computers, phones, and ipods.
My first thought when I read this headline:
40 percent of Twitter messages ‘pointless babble’: study
was that it must have been a flawed study, as 40% seems extremely low. Turns out I was right, as the rest of the article indicates the following:
Conversational messages — defined by Pear as tweets that go back and forth between users or try to engage followers in conversation — accounted for 751 messages or 37.55 percent.
In other words, pointless babble that goes back and forth between users.
Pear said tweets with “pass-along value” — messages that are being “re-tweeted” or passed on by users to their followers — accounted for 174 messages or 8.70 percent.
AKA: pointless babble that is passed along to other users.
Self-promotion by companies was next with 117 tweets or 5.85 percent
Corporate pointless babble.
followed by spam with 75 tweets or 3.75 percent.
Nigerian and “enhancement” pointless babble.
It said tweets with news from mainstream media publications accounted for 72 tweets or 3.60 percent.
Considering that most of what the mainstream media has produced over the past 40 years has been pointless babble, I’d say this category falls under that heading as well.
So my rewritten headline:
100 percent of Twitter messages ‘pointless babble’
This is a great idea: the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith announced that they will be producing DVDs which will help both clergy and the faithful properly celebrate the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, aka the Latin Mass.
Although I personally love a well-said, reverent Norvus Ordo Mass, I think the restoration of the Latin Mass was a great move by Pope Benedict. My hope is that the increased exposure to the Latin Mass will seep into the practice of the Norvus Ordo, leading it to be celebrated in a more reverent, traditional manner.
Yesterday Twitter went down in a denial-of-service attack.
Across the country millions were in a state of shock as they had no way of informing the world that they were drinking their coffee, sitting on the couch, or going to the bathroom. President Obama declared a state of emergency and ordered that millions of hand-held whiteboards be distributed so that people could describe every event of their lives to those around them. However, this caused some unintended problems as many of the “tweeters” did not know what the two-legged creatures surrounding them were – they had forgotten what real-life “people” looked like.
*Apologies to Don McLean for the title to this post.
The number of books in my “read next” pile has just reached 20. Does anyone know of any Matrix-like technology which can download the contents of these books directly into my brain? I’m sure Steve Jobs must be on the case…
One of the bedrock doctrines of the Christian Faith is that God became man in the Incarnation. Not just “man” in the generic sense, but a specific man born as a Jew in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago. He had a modest home, annoying relatives, and all the things that make up a “real life.” As Scripture says, he is like us in all things “except sin.”
The fact of the Incarnation impacts every part of our life as Christians. One of the primary things it tells us is that we are not to disdain the physical world, and in fact that God has effected our redemption through it. In other words, the physical world becomes our means to salvation. We can see this most clearly in the sacraments, when God takes humble physical objects like bread or water or oil and transforms them into something so much more and then uses them to save us. Every sacrament must also have a real human being as its minister – some sacraments require a priest, but others can be celebrated by anyone (for example, a baptism). But all sacraments require a communion of at least two people.
The importance of this physical connection can be seen in the Church’s refusal to allow the sacrament of confession to be celebrated over the phone or over the internet – the penitent and the priest must be physically present to one another for the sacrament to be valid.
I thought of all this when I saw this headline:
Fla. Megachurch Brings Worship to the iPhone
The article explains that this church, which prides itself on its “distributed” form of worship, now streams its worship service via the iPhone so that people can join them wherever they are. The pastor is quoted as saying, “It’s not a place you leave your community to go, it’s the gathering of community for worship, service and equipping.” So this pastor believes that simply watching a service from your phone is participating in that community’s “worship.”
Yet how does a large church gather its members together? The problem of gathering all members of a Church together for Sunday worship has actually been a problem since the first century – and is one that was solved in the first century as well. Each city was appointed a bishop to be the head of that local church. It was the bishop to whom all local decisions were referred. For example, writing in the early 2nd century, St. Ignatius of Antioch declares:
See that ye all follow the bishop, even as Jesus Christ does the Father, and the presbytery as ye would the apostles; and reverence the deacons, as being the institution of God. Let no man do anything connected with the Church without the bishop. Let that be deemed a proper Eucharist, which is[administered] either by the bishop, or by one to whom he has entrusted it. Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude[of the people] also be; even as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church. It is not lawful without the bishop either to baptize or to celebrate a love-feast; but whatsoever he shall approve of, that is also pleasing to God, so that everything that is done may be secure and valid.
Letter to the Smyraeans
But the authority of the local bishop did not separate the local church from the universal Church; in fact, it was through the bishop that the local church was united to the rest of the universal (or “catholic”) Church. The early Church was “distributed” by the fact that each local church was in communion – through the Eucharist – with all the other local churches throughout the Roman Empire (and beyond).
If you think about it, today the Pope is the pastor of a “megaChurch” of over 1,000,000 members. While it is true that he has made his sermons and other teachings available via various technologies (including the iPhone), he understands that a true worship experience is not simply listening to him via a TV or computer or phone, but instead requires a real gathering of people in one location to celebrate the Eucharist under the guidance of a local priest who is appointed by the local bishop. This is the way the incarnational, sacramental Church worships.
The Catholic archbishop of Westminster has come out warning his flock of the dangers of “social networking,” such as can be found on Facebook and MySpace:
“Friendship is not a commodity,” said the prelate. “Friendship is something that is hard work and enduring when it’s right”.
Archbishop Nichols said that social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace encouraged a form of communication that was not “rounded”, and would not therefore build communities. “Facebook and MySpace might contribute towards communities, but I’m wary about it,” he said. The Catholic religious leader said young people were being encouraged to build up collections of friends as commodities, that these friendships could easily collapse, and teenagers were therefore left desolate.
As can be seen on the right side of this blog, I am on Facebook, so I do not condemn the technology outright. But I am uncomfortable with its use of the term “friend” to designate those connected to you on the site. A “friend” is more than just a connection on a website, and the devaluing of this term can have serious consequences, as can be seen from the linked article (a young man committed suicide because of the taunts of online “friends”). Whenever we reduce other people to commodities – such as making them just something to increase our list of “friends” online – we seriously endanger their dignity as images of God.
I use Google Reader to follow various blogs and news sites, which has the advantage of collecting stories from around the ‘net in an easy and convenient way. However, it also means that my queue of unread items is constantly being replenished, as was made evident when I checked it this morning after my vacation and saw that I had over 800 unread entries. So I skimmed a few then clicked the “Mark All as Read” button.
I figure the world will continue to revolve even if I’m not completely up-to-date about it.
It has been interesting to see the reaction in the blogosphere to the “Wedding Dance” video. It seems that when people see it, they have one of two reactions:
My own reaction was a smile, and to be honest, I think those who have been quick to condemn the couple are dangerously close to the pharisaical attitudes our Lord condemned so often. I realize that accusations of “Pharisee!” are all too common these days and often are used to condone egregiously sacrilegious actions. Yet the Gospels make clear that our Lord does not look kindly on those who are searching for people to condemn who “break the rules.”
Those who know me know that I prefer more traditional forms of worship, as well as more traditional music to be sung during the Mass. Yet I also recognize that the exact music sung is not as important as the intention behind it. And when I see the Wedding Dance video I cannot help but see a couple that wants to celebrate their union in the best way they know how – through (modern) song and dance. This is not automatically irreverent, and nothing in that video shows a irreverence towards marriage or church in general. It might not be the standard way that middle-class American conservative Catholics would celebrate their own weddings, but frankly, middle-class American conservatism is not a divine standard to which we all must follow.
Too often we are so involved in our own culture wars that we cannot see outside of them – everything is judged according to our current battles. So those who are battling to restore more reverent music to the Mass (a worthy cause and one I support) see anything other than pre-Vatican II music as an attack on their cause. Yet this couple most likely knows nothing of our intramural battles and they simply wanted to express their joy at their nuptials. And it is joy that so often seems to be the main ingredient lacking in many who are fighting to restore our (legitimate) traditions. And thus many are quick to condemn any who do not follow our own man-made traditions, which is quite different than sacred Tradition. We must be careful that in our desire for more reverent worship in our own Church that we are not killjoys towards anyone who is outside of our own community.
Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say, Rejoice!
John Norton over at OSV has compiled a list of the top 10 Catholic sites on the internet as determined by Alexis:
1 ******12,515 ****** vatican.va
2 ******17,882 ******catholic.net
3 ******21,702 ****** ewtn.com
4 ******25,760******catholic.org
5 ******25,931******catholic.com
6 ******30,992 ******newadvent.org
7 ******33,707******usccb.org
8 ******36,778 ******catholicmatch.com
9 ******43,698******zenit.org
10******58,491******fisheaters.com
For some time now I’ve been interested in how technology impacts the way we spend our time, communicate, think, and even relate to others and to God. If you are old enough, try to imagine it is 1989 and someone sends you 20 years in the future. What would you think about the fact that everyone you see in public seems to have a phone stuck in their ear? What would you think about being able to do most of your shopping online? What would you think about Facebook or Twitter? It would be quite a shock, even though it would only be 20 years in the future.
My main concerns about these technologies revolve around how they subtly change our behavior. For example, people live in a bubble while in public now because they are consumed by their phone or ipod or handheld gaming device. How often do we ignore the person at the checkout counter because we are too busy with whatever device we have handy?
But there are other dangers as well – specifically the control these new technologies can give institutions such as governments and corporations over our lives. For example, recently Amazon got in hot water because they reached into users’ Kindles without authorization and deleted content that a publisher had decided should not be on the ebook device (Amazon did refund the purchase price). They claim they will not do it again, but the idea that one’s whole library in the future could be monitored and controlled by a corporation or a government is cause for serious concern.
Oh, the book that Amazon deleted? George Orwell’s 1984. Somewhere an irony-meter exploded.
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I am the Director of Evangelization for the Diocese of Venice in Florida.
I began my study of the Catholic faith in 1991 as an Evangelical Protestant, converting to the Catholic Church in 1993.
I regularly speak to parish groups and other organizations on a variety of topics - contact me to schedule a talk for your group.
You can email me at eric@ericsammons.com.
