The Joy of Missing Out: Finding Balance in a Wired World

Our technological advancements have one trajectory: up. Up the corporate ladder, up in social status, up and away from our surroundings, our physical demands, from the bore of the everyday. We are headed up, yet the happiest people in the world are the Danes sitting down to have dinner. Editor’s note: The following is an […]

The Imminent Decline of Contemporary Worship Music: Eight Reasons

By imminent decline of contemporary worship music, I do not mean imminent disappearance. Commercial forces have too substantial an interest to permit contemporary worship music to disappear entirely; and human beings are creatures of habit who do not adapt to change quickly. I do not predict, therefore, a disappearance of contemporary worship music, sooner or later. […]

5 Tips for Surviving in Technopolis

“We have reached a period in which all forms of cultural life have surrendered to the sovereignty of Technology,” says editorial board member Arthur Hunt in a new interview with Tony Reinke at Desiring God. “We put so much cultural stock in sort of headlong rush into the future without any clear telos [goal]. The […]

Are TED Talks the New Sermon?

The digital age is invading our society like the army of locusts in Joel’s ambiguous prophecy (Joel 2:1-17). We have been ushered into a world of bits, bytes, data, and meta-data. Our interpersonal interactions are changing, our businesses are changing, and even the wiring of our brain is changing (Carr, Jackson, Brynjolfsson). “Media is now […]

Elizabeth Drescher’s “Tweet If You [Heart] Jesus”: A Review

Tweet If You [Heart] Jesus: Practicing Church in the Digital Reformation, by Elizabeth Drescher. Harrisburg: Morehouse Publishing, 2011. 190 pages. The decline of American “mainline” Protestant denominations in the latter half of the 20th century is a well-documented phenomenon. Many explanations for the exodus have been given, with theories ranging from the appropriation of liberal […]

What do you think of my prayer?

Part five in our Lenten series on technology and spirituality. “Let us boldly become citizens of the digital world.  The Church needs to be concerned for, and present in, the world of communication, in order to dialogue with people today and to help them encounter Christ,” wrote Pope Francis in his first message for World […]

Lenten Reflections: Ash Wednesday

Note: Nowadays, technology is one of the most popular objects of Lenten sacrifice. We’ll be posting a series of weekly reflections on technology and spiritual life on Wednesdays throughout Lent, examining our own use of technology. One of the biggest reasons why people fast from technology during Lent is that we’re often frivolous in the time […]

Reading List: Best of 2013

  For our reading list this week, here’s a look back on our 10 most popular posts in 2013. We’ve got articles on praise teams, Christian hacking, microphones, Radical Orthodoxy, Youtube and more. Enjoy! 10. Of Mics and Men: An Argument Against Microphones in the Liturgy By Brantly Millegan 9. The Technological Return to the Family: […]

More Problems with Praise Music

This week, Carl R. Trueman from First Things and Charles Hopper at McSweeney’s explore the problems with praise music, expanding on T. David Gordon’s thoughtful article on The Problem with Praise Teams. Gordon focuses on how the phenomenon of the praise band misses the mark of a biblical definition of worship, arguing that the praise […]

The Secular C.S. Lewis: Neil Postman’s Unlikely Influence on Evangelicals

He was basically a secular Jew, and I am basically a conservative Christian, but he taught me more than almost any Christian I can think of (C. S. Lewis?). —Dr. T. David Gordon Dr. Gordon’s comment, which appeared in an online post among other recollections of Neil Postman (Rosen, 2003), demonstrates how well the media […]

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