Three Urban Psalms

Urban Psalm 23 The Lord is my mentor—I want him to teach. He tells me to lie down with headphones unplugged. He leads me into anonymous streets. He eats when I eat. Even though I walk the hardened streets, I have no fear. I don’t even carry a rod for comfort. He likes my cap, […]

God’s Grandeur in the Media Environment

Part six in our Lenten series on technology and spirituality. At the beginning of Lent, we examined how time-saving technology often has the tendency to help us do more work in less time and then fill up our extra time with new kinds of work. I think we intuitively realize this and commit ourselves to media […]

Passion and Precision: The Faith of Marshall McLuhan

The Catholic Church does not depend on human wisdom or human strategies for survival. All the best intentions in the world can’t destroy the Catholic Church! It is indestructible, even as a human institution. It may once again undergo a terrible persecution and so on. But that’s probably what it needs. – Marshall McLuhan Precision This is a […]

Did McLuhan’s Deeply Held Roman Catholic Convictions Bias His Scholarship?

“He was a very religious man and, as a matter of fact, that was the only thing that helped him through the 15 months after his stroke. That was the core of his being – his religious strength. – Corinne McLuhan, Marshall’s wife (McLuhan, C. 1988).” McLuhan’s religious beliefs did not bias his scholarship or […]

Jane, Stop This Crazy Thing! The End of Progress and the Beginning of a Third Way

At times I feel like George Jetson rotating round and round on my treadmill outside the Skypad apartments. I want to scream, “Jane, stop this crazy thing!” I have this gut feeling that something is very, very wrong with the world. I am not just referring to the problem of evil or what theologians call original […]

God Does Not Post to YouTube

The following text was originally delivered as a Wheaton College chapel talk on March 4th, 2009. A video of the talk may be viewed here. When the college chaplain invited me to speak on the theme of “Embracing God’s Will”, I immediately accepted — in fact, I embraced it as God’s will.  And my next […]

How the West really lost God? By mediating sex, argues new book

Secularization wasn’t the inevitable result of the Enlightenment, it was the result of the widespread acceptance of a new media. More specifically, the mediating of the one flesh union with the technology of contraception. Or so argues Mary Eberstadt in her provocative new book that is sure to spark great debate, How the West Really Lost […]

The Medium is the Messiah: McLuhan’s Religion and its Relationship to His Media Theory

To say that Marshall McLuhan was incidentally a Christian, or that his Catholicism was just part of his private life, is a little like saying that Karl Marx was only incidentally a Marxist. This essay will attempt to reconcile the seeming contradiction between the Marshall McLuhan who had “no theory of communication” and was simply […]

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