The Reformation as Media Event (Part 1)- Technologies of Devotion

The following excerpt is the first portion of Read Mercer Schuchardt’s piece, The Reformation as Media Event. This excerpt explores the ways in which Johannes Gutenberg, a devout Catholic, was interested in manufacturing technologies of religious devotion, and how the Printing Press was a natural spiritual heir to the Pilgrim’s Mirrors he was previously producing. A version […]

The Reformation as Media Event – Introduction

Second Nature Journal will be releasing Read Mercer Schuchardt’s piece The Reformation as Media Event in an introduction and seven subsequent sections. A version of this paper was published in The People’s Book: The Reformation and the Bible in April 2017, which was itself a print version of a talk given in 2016 at the Wheaton Theology Conference. Each […]

Marshall McLuhan as a Realist Philosopher

Marshall McLuhan, as a newcomer to the Catholic Church in 1937, accepted the realist philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas as its official philosophy. He contributed to the philosophy through a language-based total approach to reality which reconciled the separation between the humanities and the sciences. The root of the separation was in two versions of […]

Ellul Meets Bazin: The Ethics of Reality and the Photo/Cinema Image

On the very first page of his book The Humiliation of the Word, the French theologian and cultural critic Jacques Ellul makes his first reference to cinema: “There is also cinematic language—I’m well aware! But too often people forget that this sequence of images is not the same thing as the organization of sentences” (Ellul, […]

The Percept of Witness

It is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder. Kallistos Ware, English bishop of the Eastern Orthodox Church, Titular Bishopric of Diokleia. Consider the child’s […]

Art and Context, Postman and Monet

I like understanding things. This is why I hated for so long those parts of the art museum labelled “modern” or “contemporary.” I didn’t understand the things I saw in there, so I’d go check my phone for what I could understand: pictures on Instagram, maybe news articles on the BBC app. Glorious discontinuity. No […]

Muting the Voices of the Body: Music, Technology and Ministry, Once Again

Some telling lessons for contemporary debates about the role of technology in contemporary Christian worship, especially those technologies that organize our collective singing of praises.

The Benedict Option and the Media Ecology of Rod Dreher

Any Benedict Option that fails to deal honestly and forcefully with our relationship to technology and popular culture will fail. —Rod Dreher When Benedict of Nursia left Rome he traveled forty miles south of the city and entered a forest to pray. From there he began to build monasteries: fortresses to preserve Christian culture against […]

God is Not Spectacular

Communication technologies are not neutral channels. Just as the riverbed shapes the path of the river as much as the river does, so too, society’s media shape their organization as much as they do. To take an example, smartphones may ostensibly “connect” us, but everyone knows that what they have actually done is atomize us […]

Being Disabled in the New World of Genetic Testing

  by Brian Brock PhD and Stephanie Brock RN Introduction This paper speaks biographically in order to introduce a real time snapshot of the forces genetic technologies bring to bear on the disabled and their families. We do so as an academic theologian and a neo-natal nurse experiencing the joys and frustrations of first-time parenthood. […]

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