I find her vision of our relationship with technology to be remarkably hopeful. The way that she describes the need for a balanced connection with tech, and the process of getting there, evokes the language of brokenness and redemption. Importantly, though, this redemption is not far-off; it is something we can work towards today, in small measured steps.
The life of Jonathan Edwards, born 300 years ago this month, is a tale of a singular but complex vision crossed by paradoxical outcomes under sometimes extreme conditions. The boy was reared in a nearly all-female family under the close watch of a rigorous father. Absorbed from the start with the demands of a fearsome deity, he broke through in his late teens to a vision of that same God being, literally, sweetness and light. Plagued by a brittle personality…
Along with others, I have grown weary of the term postmodern as the blanket characteristic covering our time. The term simply carries along too much baggage, and each bag opens, as a postmodernist would say, on different meanings for different audiences. From spiritual and ethical positionings, from ways of perceiving the world, and from ways of holding all human products up to critical scrutiny, analysis, or distortion, postmodernism has settled like a dense fogbank on the scholarly imagination. One of…
The Internet: full of promise, full of power. And full of hype. As a Christian pastor and theologian, and, until recently, a technology professional, I am disturbed by the fawning hype I frequently hear about the Internet. Some of that hype may have diminished in the wake of the dot-com bust and September 11th, 2001. But the hype has not disappeared entirely, and its presence is seen everywhere from Wall Street to Main Street to Pennsylvania Avenue. One might expect…
In all actuality, we don’t know for sure. We do know what the author of the Gospel According to Matthew wrote. And we know what the other synoptic authors Mark and Luke wrote, and we have the Gospel of John. We also know their sources and approximately when the gospels were recorded. We know that they recorded many of the same events in different words, chronology and for differing theological purposes. The gospel lesson from Matthew for the last Sunday…
Angels were very real to ancient believers and very significant. As we shall see, they were the embodiments of the love of God, and they depicted how this love flowed from the heart of God and gave life to the world. The story of Jesus’ birth cannot be meaningfully told without them. But angels are not real to believers living in the 21st century.
